I can't stop listening to
Built To Spill's new album, You In Reverse.
Years ago, their song Twin Falls became one of my all-time favorite songs. The song is about childhood and growing up (kind of). Every time I listen to it, I feel like lapsing into a heaving, two-day crying jag. Somehow, it's one of the saddest songs I've ever heard.
Specifically, Twin Falls makes me think of this little blond boy I knew when I was about 10. We lived in a tiny, poor town in Kansas (or maybe we were just poor). He lived across the street. We became good friends the summer after 4th grade. He had a necklace that was a baseball glove with a baseball in it. We both liked the song Centerfold, which was big that summer, had divorced parents, and lived with our Moms. We weren't dating or anything (um, I was 10), but I liked him, and we hung out a lot. At the end of the summer, he and his mom moved away. I remember saying goodbye and then standing in the street watching him pull away in a jam-packed station wagon. It was sad.
Years later, when I was a senior in high school in a completely different town, that boy started going to my school. It was a huge school - there were over 1,000 people in my graduating class. I didn't have any classes with him. I don't know if he would have even remembered me. But every time I saw him in the halls, I felt the shadow of the sadness from the day I watched him leave that summer, but not enough to even say, "Hi."
That's how Twin Falls makes me feel.
Twin Falls was the only Built To Spill song I'd listen to. The rest of the albums we had were a little too ... I don't know ... not me. Maybe too earnest, too sweet, too natural, too dude rockers, not melancholy enough.
But their new album, You In Reverse, is a great, solid album. Every. Song. Rocks. Usually, even with my favorite albums, there are one or two songs that I take out of the playlist, but I like every song on this album. I literally can't stop listening to it: in the car, at work, at home. And when I'm not listening to it, I'm humming it.
Without being completely any one of these things, it is almost punk, almost new wave, almost pop, and almost power rock. The guitar work is like being hugged. The drumming is like getting a back rub. The singing is like a scalp massage. Each song has a personality all it's own.The last song, whose first couple seconds make it seem like an unplugged country tune, ends up being a time machine that transports me back to the late 80's and Lonesome Tonight, my favorite track from Disc 2 of Substance by New Order.
The lyrics are way cool, too: "I'm glad you're not like us, and by 'us' I mean everyone in the world who isn't you." Everything is said without pretension, without irony, without posturing. It's heartfelt rock.
[photo taken 11-6-2005 in Philadelphia][title from the lyrics of "Liar" by Built To Spill from the album "You In Reverse"]