Concert Review: Built To Spill & The Meat Puppets

Built To SPill
The Pageant
March 15, 2008







Okay... so March Madness seems to be REALLY distracting for the St. Louis Diner Review. And that does not seem like it is ANY good at all. but maybe it is. Or maybe no ne gives a shit. Who knows. Until I figure out a way to put a pagenator (legal term) on here i will never know whether it is me or both me and my mom who check the page out. Who knows.

So I saw an excellenet concert over spring break or something when Jon was home. We caught the Meat Puppets who opened for Built To Spill. Now Built To Spill has been here about 23 times over the last two years but it just seems to never get old. They are still traveling on their two year old album “You In Reverse” which also gets better and better every time I listen to it.
But lets talk about the Meat Puppets first. The puppets are a nice nineties band out of Phoenix where brothers Curt and Chris Kirkwood picked up on a Neil Young grunge theme and well. They rocked. They had a minor hit in an excellent song called “Backwater” but other then that were relegated to the hated “crtiically acclaimed” category and that was it...then it got worse when Chris Kirkwood tanked his life and got kicked out of the band... and then the brothers got together again and... oh yawn. I have never really liked the Puppets but all the music people who i respect their opintion have always loved them so... I try.
We were on the floor and it was a nice crowd but an old guys leg start to die. The Puppets did tear it up. These are age appropriate guys who can rock but in the end it comes down to... so what. the songs are generally not good enough. That is my opinion, but it always good to see the dreaded critically acclaimed.

Built To Spill is Doug Martsch along with a drummer, a bass player and two other guitars. Jim Roth and Brett Nelson are awesome in their own right but Martsch tears it up and tore through a lot of songs in a two hour set that kept daddy up too late. The set list included many of their songs from you in reverse and delved back to some excellent older stuff including “Joy Ride”, and several cuts from my favorite album “There Is Nothing Wrong With Love” including “In The Morning”, “Big Dipper” and “Twin Falls”. Twin Falls was the best as he dedicated it to his mom who was sitting stage left with his wife and a whole passle of friends.

The thing about the band is that they are the true inheritors... along with Dinosaur Jr. of the Neil Young legacy. Great simple distorted guitar with some nice lyrics that repeat over and over again as you rock into oblivion. That is all a boy can ask for. It was a good crowd and he played a long hard set and I really do not care how many times he comes to town, I will always go see him. It is that good of a show.
8 Slingers on the ten scale.