Who’s the most famous band from Idaho? Has to be Boise’s Built To Spill.
When the band emerged in the early ’90s with its brittle guitar-centric sound on “Ultimate Alternative Wavers,” its full-length debut, the sound signaled a level of vulnerability and an emotional candor that seemed to be slightly at odds with the times. The band didn’t radiate indifference or blaring rage. Its sound was both powerful and strangely thin. Scribbling guitars created their own kind of psychedelic disorientation. And frontman Doug Martsch sang with an urgency that could come on in flashes and then vanish.
Bands like Modest Mouse picked up a lot from the dense scrawl of Built To Spill’s sound. Martsch and his collaborators continued to evolve, releasing their sixth record “You In Reverse” in 2006, with touches of reggae, long-form jams and other cosmic/exploratory touches. The band released “Untethered Moon” in 2015, which found Martsch still exploring themes of inward and outward vastness, uncertainty, eschatology, truth and time. “Rock and roll will be here forever,” he sings on the opening track.
Built To Spill plays the Space Ballroom, 295 Treadwell St., Hamden, on Tuesday, April 17, at 8 p.m. Tickets $30 to $35. 203-288-6400, spaceballroom.com
