The indie rock institution Built to Spill is not currently on tour. So what accounts for the band’s surprise, one-off appearance at Fort Lauderdale’s Culture Room last night? A working vacation, you might say: For three days prior, the trio joined Modest Mouse on its inaugural curated cruise leaving from Fort Miami, entertaining guests on the Norwegian Pearl to and from their port of call in the Dominican Republic.
“How was the cruise?” queried one fan between songs last night, eliciting a simple “it was great” from bassist Melanie Radford. The band, ever workmanlike, was not in Fort Lauderdale to rhapsodize about their maritime adventures but to blanket us in two and a half hours (!) of blissed-out guitar journeys where the contours of tightly structured indie pop wrestled agreeably with extended forays into the jam-band cosmos. This was my fifth Built to Spill show in Fort Lauderdale alone, and my eighth or ninth overall. Most of them ended after 14 or 15 songs, but this performance nearly hit Paul McCartney length, with the band truly leaning into its opener-free “An Evening With” designation.
One could argue that the set peaked early, in the form of second selection “Stop the Show,” a psychedelic journey that lived up to its name, allowing plenty of room for singer/guitarist Doug Martsch to stretch out musically, while Teresa Esguerra rained thunder down from the drum kit. But, like an impressive mountainous skyline, this proved to be the first of many such apices, including but not limited to “Strange,” wherein Martsch essentially sang with his guitar, blissed out and eyes closed; the twisty and elaborate solos that beefed up the early classic “Twin Falls”; and an absolutely epic “Conventional Wisdom,” a marathon of Dead-at-Fillmore-West sprawl, where I could swear I astral-traveled at some point in the middle. So did Martsch, perhaps: This is what happens when you give this man a muscular rhythm section that can dig deep into a groove, allowing the frontman to sail into the sonic stratosphere.
The performance also included “Fire to Dust,” a new and unreleased tune whose folky shuffle offered a pleasant disruption from the eardrum-tickling volume of much of the show. It was followed by Radford on vocals for a smoldering cover of Heartless Bastards’ “The Mountain”—the first time in Built to Spill’s history, so far as I’m aware, without a Martsch vocal. Consequently, the tune sounded like a different band’s vibe, but by no means a lesser one. Martsch has always been the nucleus around which its various particles converge, but I’d welcome more of Radford’s creativity beyond her stellar contribution to the low end.
The staccato power-pop of “Big Dipper,” as it often does, energized the packed-to-the-gills Culture Room crowd, with one front-row fan bringing along a stuffed brontosaurus in reference to a lyric in the song. But the most notable aspect of this performance may have been Martsch missing his cue to start the second verse because he was laughing with Radford—a rare moment of obvious joy from a performer not known for foregrounded emotions in his playing. Needless to say, the enthusiasm was mutual.
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