Henrik Schwarz: Live

Built To Spill's most recent studio album, last year's Keep It Like A Secret, was one of those career-defining records that force listeners to reassess each of the works that precede it. For example, the group's Perfect From Now On once seemed flawed by bouts of windy indulgence, but in context, it stands as a frequently beautiful, majestic epic. Equally skilled at dense, compact rock songs and strenuous guitar freak-outs, the Idaho band has spent the last few years asserting itself as a skilled student of the Neil Young School Of Rock: Singer-guitarist Doug Martsch may not emulate Young's fearless sincerity, but he comes close to matching his propensity for difficult, dissonant, immensely powerful music, deepened by musical integrity that makes every release worth hearing. As if to hammer home the comparison, Built To Spill conveniently devotes more than 20 of Live's 72 minutes to a grand cover of Young's "Cortez The Killer" that's about as note-for-note as a jam-intensive 20-minute Neil Young cover can get. But that cover, the literal and figurative centerpiece of this collection, stands as its own uniquely transcendent rock moment (20 of them, in fact), definitively asserting Built To Spill's considerable power as a live act. If Live exists solely to drive that point home, it's nonetheless more than convincing, especially by the time you get to its swan song, "Broken Chairs," which rivals "Cortez" in power and sheer length.