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Tracklist (CD)
| 1 | | Bitter Sweet Symphony | | 5:58 | | 2 | | Sonnet | | 4:21 | | 3 | | The Rolling People | | 7:01 | | 4 | | The Drugs Don't Work | | 5:05 | | 5 | | Catching The Butterfly | | 6:26 | | 6 | | Neon Wilderness | | 2:37 | | 7 | | Space And Time | | 5:36 |
See more tracks| 8 | | Weeping Willow | | 4:49 | | 9 | | Lucky Man | | 4:53 | | 10 | | One Day | | 5:03 | | 11 | | This Time | | 3:50 | | 12 | | Velvet Morning | | 4:57 | | 13.1 | | Come On | | 15:15 | | 13.2 | | Deep Freeze | | 2:12 |
* Items below may differ depending on the release.
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Review
Theft? Yeah, brilliant theft. Before the Verve sampled that bit of symphonic Stones in "Bitter Sweet Symphony," the riff -- cribbed from an old Muzak platter laughably credited to the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra (as if the Stones' old manager actually waved the baton) -- was just soft cheese. The Verve and their sunken-cheeked singer/lyricist Richard Ashcroft turned it into great theater, a swelling, swaggering pop treatise on heroic determination. "Urban Hymns," the British band's third LP, is an entire album on the subject, a defiantly psychedelic… Read More record -- soaked in slipstream guitars and breezy strings, cruising at narcotic-shuffle velocity -- about coping and crashing, about how "The Drugs Don't Work" (as Ashcroft puts it in the album's most ravishing song). What does work: Ashcroft yelling, "Fuck you! Come on!" in the last track over a big riff tide that leaves you stunned, cleansed and jones-ing for more. Built to Spill make you work harder for epiphany. Where the Verve specialize in guitar hypnosis, singer/guitarist/songwriter Doug Mart.erh spins you 'round with slash-'n'-jangle guitar math and the kind of cryptoverse games that summon discomfiting memories of mid-'70s Yes albums. Yet Perfect From Now On, Built to Spill's major-label bow, is progressive rock in the most earnest sense of the term: a record of risk, invention and inspired forward motion, away from indie-rock cliche and out to What the Fuckville. Martsch walks a fine line between garage-opera spectacle (the spiralingguitar suite "Untrustable/Pt. 2 [About Someone Else]") and utter ham (the cosmological jive in "Randy Described Eternity"). But he does it with nerve and verve. DAVID FRICKE
(Dec 25, 1997-Jan 8, 1998)
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