Perfect from Now On
| Perfect from Now On | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by Built to Spill | ||||
| Released | January 28, 1997 | |||
| Genre | Indie rock | |||
| Length | 54:13 | |||
| Label | Warner Bros. | |||
| Producer | Phil Ek | |||
| Built to Spill chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Alternative Press | |
| Chicago Tribune |  |
| Entertainment Weekly | B+ |
| NME | 8/10 |
| Pitchfork Media | 9.2/10 |
| Rolling Stone | |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| Spin | 8/10 |
| The Village Voice | B+ |
Perfect from Now On is the third full-length album released by Built to Spill, and the band's first major label (Warner Bros.) release. It was recorded at the Avast! Recording Company in Seattle, Washington by Phil Ek. Stylistically, the album was marked by its experimentation with longer song structures, philosophical lyrics, and the incorporation of cello.
The album was essentially recorded three times. The first time, Martsch attempted to play all the instruments except drums. He and Phil Ek were dissatisfied with the results, so Martsch brought in Nelson and Plouf and recorded the album again. However, these tapes were destroyed by heat when Ek was driving from Seattle to Boise to record additional overdubs. The band rehearsed some more, then recorded the album a third time.
In September 2008, the band embarked on a three-month tour to perform the album in its entirety.
Perfect from Now On displays more "melodic grandeur" than previous Built to Spill albums, is more influenced by psychedelic rock, and addresses attempts to "grasp the infinite" in its lyrics. According to a 2008 interview with Martsch, the song's lyrics draw upon a metaphor for eternity, explained to him by a college professor, as the whittling down of a metal sphere ("ten times the size of Jupiter … to the size of a pea") with only a feather.
The album also included new instrumentation and more complex song structures, such as "I Would Hurt a Fly", which evolves from "jittery rock to haunting chamber pop" with a cello interlude between. Other songs, such as "Stop the Show", also transition from one song segment to another, with instruments from the Mellotron to the acoustic guitar, and without choruses, creating a "sprawling, abstract" effect.
The album's nearly nine-minute closer, "Untrustable / Part 2 (About Someone Else)", is a "series of seamlessly linked songs within a song" a "churning, oceanic ode to the relative nature of the divine"—centered on the repeated "angrily shouted" phrase "And God is whomever you perform for"—before finally "tumbling into a warehouse full of clocks and wind chimes".
Perfect from Now On was released to widespread critical acclaim and is widely regarded as an indie rock masterpiece as well as Built to Spill's magnum opus. Pitchfork.com ranked this album at #22 on its "Top 100 Albums of the 90s" list. The album, along with 1999's Keep It Like a Secret, is frequently cited as one of the greatest indie rock albums of all time, and has come to influence many modern alternative, rock, and indie acts.
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