Ironically enough, the advent of hardcore saw punk eventually become as self-indulgent as the “hippie rock” it was meant to destroy. When it reached the point where one could refer to “generic hardcore”, when any one band sounded exactly like any fifteen other bands, when vocals became nothing more than undifferentiated growls about how fucked up life was – with no more insight than that – the minute-thirty punk blast became just as wanky as the twenty-minute drum solo. Blessedly quicker, yes, but equally as self-indulgent.

It’s what one does with the time one takes that matters, not how much time one takes. Case in point: both the new disc from Built To Spill, You In Reverse, and the self-titled debut from Howlin’ Rain, both tend to clock in on the longer side (average BTS track length is 5:44; average HR length is 6:30), yet neither wears out their welcome. In fact, they’re my two favorite releases so far this year.

You could probably plop Howlin’ Rain directly into the lap of, say, 1971 and it would not seem entirely out of place. Let’s have a gander at track one: The music is bucolic folk-psych, an amiable soundtrack for a sunny Saturday morning with joint in hand and the day ahead. Ethan Miller, of Comets On fire, has a happy little guitar wah-wah thingy goin’ on that made me think Grateful Dead (in a good way, mind you) from the first time I heard it. Drums (John Moloney, of Sunburned Hand of the Man) and bass (Ian Gradek, who, according to the press packet, is an “iron worker and world traveler”) chug along nicely. The vocals are somewhat obscured by Miller’s ragged singing style. He sounds as if he’s channeling Rob Tyner (late of the MC5 and this earth). The few words that can be picked out are somewhat ominous – did he really say “blood and murder”? A quick consultation of the cover tells me that the title is “Death Prayer In Heaven’s Orchard”. Ooooh, that’s a giveaway. Let’s check the lyric sheet… yep. It’s 100% pure 21st Century Death-Trip:

We are born into fire
Born beasts to hunt each other down
build our churches of blood and murder
and judge our wealth by what we keep from each other

You brother once had love in hand
now you show only teeth and eyes
you walk the desert half-wolf, half-god
kicking at the skulls of husbands and daughters

We carry our hate like slaves
We are born ferried to the grave

It gets darker from there on out.

Howlin’ Rain is the hippie dream curdled, a harshing of mellows from sea to shining sea. You expect to hear all about peace and love and happiness; what you get, music aside, is a steady diet of bones and blood and slavery and rot. It’s that tension between the happy stoner melodies that lull the listener into a false sense of security and the bleak lyrics that kill the buzz that makes this an album I’d play three times through, back to back, on my first hearing. Which I did.

And then there’s Miller’s guitar work. If you’ve heard Comets On Fire’s last release, Blue Cathedral, you’ll recognize his crushing skronk. Same exact guitar tone, almost as if he’d lifted his gtr. track from Cathedral and recycled it here. Where it fit right in with the crazed psychedelic roar there, it jars a bit on this disc. I think that’s the point. “Calling Lightning With A Scythe” begins with a pastoral banjo/acoustic guitar ramble; there’s a mild-mannered electric lead, which mutates at the 3:09 mark into punishing chaos and darkness. If the rest of the song is an organic whole wheat carrot cake at a mid-summer picnic (and for the sake of argument, let’s say that it is), the solo is the industrial chainsaw used to cut it.

Then again, there are times where his style fits perfectly. “Roll On, the Rusted Days” could easily be mistaken for an outtake from Spirit’s pop-psych epic, The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus. That makes it top-notch right there. The fuzzbox frenzy is a little dirtier than the guitar tone Randy California generally used, but it is certainly in the ballpark, just sitting a little further down the bench. The ragged horn chart and doo-doo-do-do-do-do’s just carry it over the top to Valhalla, as far as I’m concerned. “Indians, Whores and Spanish Men of God” has a bit of a Faces vibe to it, which unfortunately means it also has a bit of a Black Crowes vibe as well. Caveat emptor and all that, although the out-of-control sax squonkings save it from tipping over all the way into utter pastiche territory if the by-now familiar boo-scary doom & gloom lyrics don’t.

Ultimately, though, Howlin’ Rain is an homage to times and tunes past. Not necessarily a bad thing, at all, but for those not attuned to music of that particular vintage, it will almost certainly frustrate and/or annoy. Fear not, my friend, for uncle b has something for you, too. Namely, You In Reverse.

Built To Spill often get compared to Neil Young, and I can kinda see why – Doug Martsch’s somewhat high-pitched, nasal vocals have that same sorta “lost” quality to them, and then of course there’s his predilection for relatively long songs full of quality guitar work. One of the things I really like about this album, though, is the interplay between Martsch’s guitar and that of newly commissioned full member Jim Roth (and, sometimes, Brett Netson, too – three guitars, no waiting). There’s a tension at times that reminds of the Lloyd-Verlaine tag-team assault of Television, and there’s not much higher praise available to mere humans than that.

Songs twist and shift. There’s a sense of space, of stretching out and finding just where a particular song can actually go rather than reining it in at some arbitrary, predetermined point. I’m guessing this is due to the fact that most of the songs were assembled from various, uh, jam sessions the band had in preparation for the recording. The songs that have more conventional structures, and therefore were probably written in one sitting, come off much weaker than their more free-flowing siblings. “Traces”, “Liar” and “Saturday” would be pretty cool in another context, “Liar” especially so. Here, they seem almost stifled by comparison. The fact that they all appear in that sequence on the album almost made me give up, honestly. Sprawling opener “Goin’ Against Your Mind” set such a great tone that those three numbers coming next deflated my hopes for this disc.

Happily, things loosen up again afterwards and stay that way for the duration. And, as an extra added bonus, Martsch’s lyrics take a turn for the political. I think. It’s kinda ambiguous at times, but I don’t think there’s any other way to take “Conventional Wisdom” than as a slap at the formerly monolithic, now crumbling right – “They don’t know they’re wrong / but you know that they never concede that / that’s what makes ‘em strong / that they know that we’ll never see it”. Spot on. And, y’know, all sorts of majestic guitar lines finish out the song in a… well, inspirational way. For me, at any rate, and I feel like such a schmuck for putting it in those terms. Fuck it. It’s late, I’m on my fourth (?) whiskey, and it’s the truth.

This is big, wide-canvas music. If you’ve never once had even a glimmer of joy in your heart inspired by the likes of, say, (either early or late era) Pink Floyd, if you only want music delivered to you in concentrated, easy-to swallow lumps, this may not be the disc for you. I was somewhat hesitant to bring up the Floyd thing, as there are few bands as fraught with baggage as they are (The Dead are the only ones coming to mind), but it’s an occasionally accurate comparison. “Gone” has an especially Floydian vibe to it, due in part to a Gilmore-esque solo by… I dunno, one of the guitarists… and the keyboard chordings of Quasi’s Sam Coombs, yet it never slops over into the excessive bombast Roger Waters made his stock in trade. Similarly, “Just A Habit” teeters on the brink of wankery but never quite falls over the edge. Don’t get the wrong idea, though; this is not “Dark Side of the Moon” junior. Martsch and Co. go right out to the boundaries of overkill, but they’re able to pull it back in time. There is a tension (there’s that word again) between the melancholy nature of some of the songs (“Just A Habit”, “The Wait”, “Liar”) and those aforementioned majestic guitar lines that helps keep them grounded, where so many others attempting the same feat just shoot off into the void.

All this and they maintain a sense of humor, too. I mean, “Mess With Time” goes from portentous neo-prog to bouncy pseudo-ska over the space of 5:42 – what’s not to love about that?

I’ll be very surprised indeed if You In Reverse doesn’t make my year-end best-of list, and Howlin’ Rain has a very good shot at it as well. We’re just barely into May. I take this as a good sign.

Built To Spill’s You In Reverse is available from Warner Brothers Records – a major label, so no linky. Buy it from your local independent music retailer, why don’t you? Howlin’ Rain’s Howlin’ Rain will be available May 23, from Birdman Records.