Doug Martsch

The blues can be a terrible thing. They take your woman, leave you broke and turn your children against you; sometimes your own dog doesn't even recognize you. The blues have also ruined many talented rock musicians, getting them to play drearily predictable chords while mouthing vernacular cliches devoid of any spark of emotion, either felt or transmitted.

There seems to be something in the prescribed form of 12-bar blues that gets rockers weak in the knees at a certain point in their lives, when they get tired of inventing chord patterns and think that playing within a certain discipline will channel their artistry. Unfortunately, routine seems to follow prescription, until you have an interesting songwriter falling over himself to contribute his Stevie Ray Vaughan impersonation to the public forum.

Of course, all rock 'n' roll owes some debt to blues music, and so every rock musician eventually has to tousle with the question: What to do with the blues?

Doug Martsch, who for the past 10 years has fronted the brilliant rock band Built to Spill, has tried to answer that question with his new solo album, Now You Know (Warner), which uses traditional forms to produce something that stands between genre exploration and a new path.

Interestingly, Martsch is not someone who grew up with the blues, and blues music does not exert a conspicuous influence on Built to Spill records. Built to Spill consistently put out some of the best rock music of the 1990s, and while many felt that their last album, Ancient Melodies of the Future, had regressed a little, there's no question that each of the previous albums had been exemplars of a wide range of rock music.

There's Nothing Wrong with Love, the 1994 album that brought Built to Spill its first large-scale attention, and their record deal with Warner Bros., was a collection of distortion-heavy guitar explosions that mined the intersections of love and childhood wistfulness. Three years passed before another album emerged, 1997's Perfect from Now On, which stands as one of the most complex, textured and satisfying rock albums of the 1990s. Almost all the songs topped six minutes, and lyrical and instrumental themes continually reappeared as touchstones for listeners. It still stands as a near perfectly overwrought album. There seemed little else to do, and so Martsch and company took two years to bring out Keep It Like a Secret, 10 immediately catchy and pleasurable pop songs, that was a large success in the areas that great guitar-pop songs are these days: college campuses and indie record stores.

All bands have a point where their hipness cachet is at a height, which for Built to Spill was after Perfect from Now On, and their popularity usually peaks at the time of the next album, Keep It Like a Secret in this case. So no one was really too surprised when Ancient Melodies of the Future got some mixed reviews from critics and fans. It sounds like a grim joke, but here were Martsch's options: write another solid rock album that would get less attention than the previous one, or do a traditional, country blues album. In career suicide, he chose the latter, and we are thankful for it.

According to Martsch, he served a kind of apprenticeship to the blues. Though he was interested in lots of blues-influenced rock of the Zeppelin school, traditional blues were "all too Jim Belushi for [him]." Then, in 1998, he was introduced to the Alan Lomax-recorded The First Recordings, the work of Mississippi Fred McDowell. Captured on McDowell's porch, the album brought raw country blues out of the Delta, perhaps for the first time. Martsch says, "It sounded exactly like what I wanted the blues to be," which rings true to anyone who's ever endured overwrought electric blues and recognized an essential purity lurking within.

He started to listen to a lot of country blues, but McDowell remained his favorite. So Martsch started to emulate his style, using finger picks, a glass slide and the open-G tuning that gives McDowell's music a distinctive air. With open G, in which several of the strings are tuned down, strumming the guitar without fingering the frets will produce a G chord. Martsch wrote and sang simple songs in this style for about a year before deciding to record. It's an appealing exercise, theoretically. Though the ethos of much rock music has always been to downplay technical rigor, the constraints of playing in a style, a tuning or a key can often channel creativity more effectively than improvisation. It's like writing a sonnet, or drawing from a model.

So how does it sound? At first listen, quite odd. The guitar starts up with that slightly scratchy slide sound that's a bit of an acquired taste. On the low strings, there's a plodding, ascending bassline that comes to the front every few measures. The recording techniques are modern, but besides that we're in McDowell territory. It sounds slightly primitive, slightly urgent. A couple of measures are played, and then it's obviously time for the vocals to come in. Though I knew it was a Doug Martsch album, there was still a part of me that expected to hear a rasping old black man come in with a tale of trouble. But instead it's Martsch's high keening that we hear, and the lyrics are his typically obscure impressions, though their obscurity is toned down slightly. It's a shock, almost a novelty, like hearing William Shatner sing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." "Now you/Should know by now/It's a small sound/That holds you down," are the first lyrics Martsch sings, and it's tempting to agree with him, to recognize that there's not much bombast here, but the effect is still fairly invasive.

The album isn't all spare and solo, however. While it begins with a few songs in the acoustic solo manner of the first song, "Offer," by the midpoint Martsch has loosened up a bit, added some drums and the occasional electric track. The volume steadily increases through till the last song, "Stay," which acts as a sort of coda. It's a soft, traditional-style number, where the vocals sound as if they were recorded on a porch, distant and in the background.

On average, the strongest songs are not the purest. The ones in which Martsch sticks to his self-imposed discipline, writing strictly in the McDowell tradition, suffer slightly when compared to the moments when he lets his rocker instincts sully the mix. This is done to varying degrees. The penultimate song, "Impossible," develops into a full-on jam, with that ascending, spiraling guitar line that dates from Perfect from Now On. At six and a half minutes, it's also the longest song here, by more than two minutes. It's a satisfying song, but it's too much a rehash of his old stuff. More enjoyable is "Window," which starts off as a traditional slide instrumental, with a rhythm guitar backbeat. It continues in this vein for a minute and a half, meandering a little, showing off a bit. Then it starts to fade out, and another set of tracks replaces it. The lead guitar is more aggressive this time, and a drum replaces the rhythm guitar. Martsch is singing by this point, and while the song hasn't lost its roots, it has a new urgency, and it's lifted off the ground.

Ironically, the only cover here, of McDowell's "Woke Up This Morning (With my Mind on Jesus)," is one of the most electrified of Martsch's collection. The opening follows the original fairly closely, but where McDowell plays an acoustic line, Martsch plays electric. Then he gears up, and the rest of the song is a loud powerhouse. It seems as if the result should be awful, a sheer destruction of a quiet spiritual, but somehow Martsch's version feels like a faithful homage. The original is not a humble song, and Martsch accentuates that defiance. He's made a bold choice with this song: it could have easily come off like the scene in the movie Ghost World, where an old ragtime master plays some simple, elegant songs before he has to make way for the blues-rock band Blueshammer, who open with the squeal of distorted guitars and the lines, "Well, I been plowin' behind the mule, son/A pickin' cotton all day long."

The successes of Now You Know seem small, but they are great for what has been avoided. Martsch, this man from Idaho who has never seemed to much care about battles of ideological purity, has walked a fine line, and in doing so has produced an album unlike any I know. He has avoided butchering a great blues tradition, but he also has demonstrated he has no interest in aping his elders. It's often said as a criticism that contemporary art has no deep roots; that it tries on and discards styles and ethoses as it needs. In music, it should happen more often.