eMusic Review
Frontman Doug Martsch may have refreshed his band's lineup yet again for There Is No Enemy, but the course charted still recalls album-friendly 90's alternative rock with a delirious fondness, reminiscent at its most hectic points of an appropriately-medicated Screaming Trees or Sunny Day Real Estate, elsewhere even scaling the dreamy guitar bobbles back into hummable-hooks territory about halfway to the Gin Blossoms.
One might argue that Built to Spill was somewhat unfairly pushed from the spotlight during their first decade — even though that's precisely the era which most directly shaped their sound in the next — but their response to that mirrors their remarkably-revived former labelmates Nada Surf.
Nobody's going to bother trying to invent a silly new genre name around this record, but Marsch's tacit acceptance of that almost qualifies as a shrugging statement of a different sort; There Is No Enemy wouldn't reasonably be considered a groundbreaking outing in either decade, of course, but we're reminded here that there's still value in the lineage nonetheless.
