Built to Spill’s new album, There is No Enemy, brilliantly captures the melodic beauty of these indie rock forefathers. It’s good old, traditional Built to Spill sounding as great as ever. The album is their 7th and the 1st since they released 2006′s You In Reverse, the band’s highest charting album yet. On There is No Enemy, Built to Spill investigates an aesthetic they’ve created and honed over the years, revolving around Doug Martsch’s soft, yet penetrating vocals swimming in a bath of refracting guitar tones. The band again finds a new and interesting way to approach this sound.

Martsch’s lyrics are poignant and inviting. When he sings “Goddammit, things fall apart” on the appropriately titled “Things Fall Apart,” it’s hard not to feel like you understand. And on “Life’s A Dream”, he wisely reflects, “Waste your life/ but you don’t know what it’s worth/ Comb your mind/ For all the treasures of this earth / Too close to find/ anything outside yourself.”

Below are the 3 tracks that lead into There Is No Enemy. The band is currently streaming the entire album on MySpace.

mp3: Built to Spill – Aisle 13 – There Is No Enemy (2009)
mp3: Built to Spill – Hindsight – There Is No Enemy (2009)
mp3: Built to Spill – Nowhere Lullaby – There Is No Enemy (2009)

Nowhere Lullaby
Trying not to solve this
Doesn’t mean it’s not that bad

And everyone gets through the night
And everyone wakes up all right
And the fear you feel will pass
Then a calmness that will last
We will learn to drift off fast

Another nowhere lullaby
You can rest or you can try
And this waste it shines in every way
Yeah this waste it shines in every way

Make me laugh every single day
And you hardly make me cry
Made fifteen years fly by
Still here and I don’t know why

Has it been that long
Is the time and the table gone

Hope it’s longer than that now
Don’t forget we don’t know how
And everyone gets feeling down
Everybody understands
We’re all doing what we can

Another nowhere lullaby
You can rest or you can try
And this waste it shines in every way
Yeah this waste it shines in every way

Built to Spill | MySpace

Download through Amazon: There Is No Enemy

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 18th, 2009 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Album Reviews, Featured Bands, Indie, Songs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.