Goin' Against Your Mind

Built to Spill at their most expansive and uncompromising, this nearly nine-minute track from *You in Reverse* is Doug Martsch at his most guitar-obsessive. The first half builds through intricate riffing and Martsch's characteristically earnest vocals, which carry his trademark quality of sounding simultaneously plaintive and certain. Then the track opens into an extended instrumental passage that feels less like indulgence than arrival — the guitars trading off in spiraling lines that seem to be working something out in real time. Lyrically the song plays with ideas of resistance and futility, the idea of pushing against systems too large to budge, but the tone isn't defeated. The Boise, Idaho provenance matters here: there's a plainspoken midwestern stubbornness in how the song refuses to wrap up tidily. Best experienced with headphones and forty-five minutes to spare, when you want music to take you somewhere rather than just keep you company.