Doug Martsch: Now You Know

Built To Spill leader Doug Martsch suffers from a lack of self-confidence and a restless spirit, which means that he tends to reject his best recorded work and start fresh with each album, attempting new styles and forms that have been drifting out of synch with his natural gifts. Built To Spill followed the twangy pop delights of 1994's There's Nothing Wrong With Love with the epic emotional sprawl of 1997's Perfect From Now On, then cobbled a little of each approach into 1999's ingratiating Keep It Like A Secret. But last year's bland Ancient Melodies From The Future had too much slow grind, and Martsch preceded it by recording his first solo album, a parochial, blues-inspired affair called Now You Know, which was shelved for two years and is just now showing up in stores. The tone of the record is best exemplified by "Window," which opens with an extended slide-blues breakdown before shifting abruptly into a bouncy hootenanny singalong. The similar "Lift" also breaks in two, with the latter half featuring a rare (for this record) electric-guitar solo and a dramatic changeover to melancholy pensiveness, signaled by the line "I can't seem to get a lift." On "Dream," Martsch's heavenly pop songcraft and earthy slide-guitar experiments coalesce into a righteous whole; the same thing happens on "Gone," which is essentially a slightly faster retread of "Dream." On the flip side, there's "Heart (Things Never Shared)," a mopey Martsch-by-numbers ballad every bit as drippy as its title, with a bluesy guitar injection that sounds like an afterthought. The heavy, electrified cover of Mississippi Fred McDowell's "Jesus" is an unwelcome revisitation of the dark and unwieldy acid-rock blues of the late '60s, before the six-and-a-half-minute "Impossible" settles into one of Martsch's extended tuneless drones. Duds and semi-duds aside, Now You Know holds together okay, with plenty of high points, mostly huddled together in the first half. But its rewards remain suspect, given Martsch's history. He's got a distinctive and not-unpleasant voice, the ability to lay into transcendent guitar solos, a more-than-passable melodic sense, and a knack for assembling images and accusations into meaningful lyrics. Yet he seems determined to hang with the obscurities who inspired him—the old bluesmen and indie-rockers whose quirks and obsessiveness keep them scrawling along the margins—and if getting there means denying his talents, so be it. For Martsch's fans, salvaging a few promising tracks from an album by a musician capable of making cohesive classics threatens to become a dispiriting hobby.