You can hear echoes of Martsch’s skewed pop sensibilities in both the riffs and the vocals. Their sole album, the stone-cold PNW classic These Are Not Fall Colors, pulls influence from fellow Olympians Unwound, as well as Fugazi and Drive Like Jehu, but Lync take a more tuneful approach. In Olympia: Occasional Built To Spill bassist James Bertram joined the short-lived but influential post-hardcore band Lync. “It was all really like Treepeople influence and whatnot,” Brock said to the LA Times about Modest Mouse’s initial run of releases. In Issaquah: Isaac Brock formed Modest Mouse a year after Built To Spill came into existence, but his guitar playing style had already been shaped by seeing Martsch play. “There’s some flagrant Built To Spill ripoffs on that record,” he admitted. In an interview with Vice, Gibbard noted that the only thing he was listening to while working on 1998’s Something About Airplanes was Perfect From Now On. In Bellingham: Death Cab For Cutie’s first two albums (one as a solo project, the next with a band) are pure Built To Spill worship. Wherever Martsch plugged his amp in, it seems, he birthed a new band. Both Treepeople and Built To Spill played regularly in Boise, Seattle, and everywhere in between. Martsch’s soft-spoken demeanor and gentle, reedy singing voice belie the seismic impact of his particular blend of melodic sensibility and scorching solos. Gibbard is one of the card-carrying members of a PNW club who would start their own bands with one goal in mind: doing their best to write Built To Spill songs. I love that Gibbard carries that story around with him, folded up in his wallet to break out at a moment’s notice. Over eight albums, he has etched a legacy of clever, inventive indie rock and a trove of truly bitchin’ riffs. Most releases have – intentionally – featured a rotating cast of musicians on drums, bass, and additional guitars with Martsch as the only constant. For almost three decades, he has wheedled cryptic observations about the cosmos and Boise, Idaho over illuminated tapestries of guitar heroics. Robert Christgau once superbly described Martsch as “not a loner, just a small-town kind of guy.” He’s the archetypal Pacific Northwest flannel-clad guitar god, packaged as an unassuming composite sketch of a slacker.įor the vast majority of Built To Spill’s existence, Martsch has been the sole songwriter, and it’s a mode that seems to suit him. Picture him: lying in a hammock in the backyard as his band drives away without him, peering up into the heavens through a cloud of weed smoke, humming a little tune that he would later bang out on guitar by himself. Whether or not it actually happened, the story communicates something undeniable about Martsch’s essence. As the story goes: the band left Doug at his house, played the show without him, and he never played with Treepeople again. than the intense, brooding grunge that flooded the post-Mudhoney PNW.Īccording to Gibbard, Treepeople had a show a few hours away from Boise, but when they showed up at Doug’s house to pick him up, he told them he simply he didn’t feel like going. However, Treepeople’s urgent indie rock, strewn with wailing guitar solos, had more in common with punk and East Coast college rock like Dinosaur Jr. Treepeople got their start in 1988, right as Sub Pop was codifying the “Seattle sound” that became the grunge explosion. I can’t confirm if the events of this story actually took place, but it’s worth telling anyways.īefore Martsch became the singer, guitarist, and songwriter for Built To Spill, he played in the influential Boise-based band Treepeople, sharing guitar and vocal duties with Scott Schmaljohn. Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie recently told a story about Doug Martsch on Damian Abraham’s podcast Turned Out A Punk.
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