Random Access Memory

Built to Spill songs tend to circle their subject the way a satellite circles a planet — never quite landing, always pulling closer. This one moves in interlocking guitar figures that weave around each other with a patience that feels almost architectural, Doug Martsch building something quietly elaborate while the rhythm section keeps a loose, organic pulse beneath. The tempo is unhurried but never slack; there's a tension in the restraint, the sense that the guitars could unravel into full noise at any moment but keep choosing not to. Martsch's voice carries that particular quality of his — thin, slightly strained, reaching upward — that makes earnestness sound like a form of courage. The lyrics turn over questions of memory and mental accumulation, the way experience lodges in the brain and plays back unbidden, a meditation on cognition that somehow avoids being cold. This is Boise indie rock at its most cerebral, from an era when the Pacific Northwest underground was treating three-minute songs as insufficient containers. Best heard somewhere alone and still, late afternoon, when your own mind is already doing its random retrieval.