eMusic Review 0
How big is Perfect From Now On? So big that Doug Martsch had to record it three times to get it out. The first time, he tried to play every instrument except the drums by himself — the actions of a man possessed. When this failed, he scrapped his band and gathered together some new musicians to help him flesh out the sound that was banging down the door in his head — a sound he must have instinctively known was out of the technical grasp of his current crew. Hell, it was hardly within his own; after he finally surrendered it to his record label, he could no longer bear to hear it, and the album's title was, apparently, a mocking rejoinder to himself. "All I could hear was the imperfections," he lamented later to Rolling Stone, a pretty striking sentiment from a guy who never used to sweat the glaringly fumbled notes in his wandering guitar solos.
Martsch and his new lineup — Bret Nelson on bass, Scott Plouf on drums, Quasi's Sam Coombes on organ, and John McMahon on cello — assembled the sound out of pieces and fragments, frustratingly incomplete transmissions from another world. Martsch struggled… read more »
