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Description
**Built to Spill - *Untethered Moon* (2015)**
Six years after the relatively unsung *There Is No Enemy* (2009), Doug Martsch's *Untethered Moon* emerges with the quiet gravity of a band finally comfortable in its own skin. Recorded in 2014 and gracing the record shop turnstiles on Record Store Day, April 18th, 2015, the album finds the Idaho quartet less concerned with the restless tinkering that defined their earlier output and more interested in distilling rock and roll's perennial truth: that things fall apart, but faith-however diffident-can be restored. Martsch spells it out early, on the title track's companion "All Our Songs," where he sings of being tethered to a place where music lives forever. The album's ten tracks trace a modest but satisfying arc, from the extended, animalistic metaphor of "Living Zoo" to the walking bass, dub-inflected darkness of "C.R.E.B.," a reggae-tinged warning Martsch had been threatening since the previous decade.
The familiarity of *Untethered Moon* operates as a balm, not a trap. Where the mid-'90s Martsch threw together different band configurations like a restless tinkerer, his current sound-settled since the turn of the millennium-has yielded albums that feel less like experiments than confessions. On *Untethered Moon*, Martsch still messes around with unexpected ways to fit together guitar rock songs: on "All Our Songs," everything drops out for him to play a little three-note figure surrounded by silence, before the band returns with a pedal stomp. There are female backing voices on "On the Way," adding a walking bass line and a cloudy menace to the mix. The higher the emotional stakes, the better Martsch gets; you sense he could jam out a passable album in a few weeks if he wanted to, but he seems to care more than ever about the quality of the work.
If you've loved Built to Spill your whole life, *Untethered Moon* will have this same comforting, classic feel. The self-deprecation in song titles-"Some Other Song," "Another Day"-sounds like a world-beating talent recognizing his own limitations, deciding whether to make something good or something great. There will always be flickers of the latter on Built to Spill's albums, and if there are only four or five of them here, they are bright enough to reassure that Martsch is probably not going anywhere.
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1. [Pitchfork Review of *Untethered Moon*](https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20362-untethered-moon/) by Jayson Greene.
2. [Wikipedia Entry for *Untethered Moon*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untethered_Moon) - eighth studio album by Built to Spill, released on vinyl for Record Store Day in 2015.
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