I’d meant to mention that I went to check out Built to Spill on Monday, despite having been pretty disappointed with their live show on previous outings. But, as they’re one of my four or five favorite bands, I rather strongly wanted to believe my previous experience was aberrant—and I’m glad I gave them another chance, because they were phenomenal. Last time around seemed, as I recall, rather heavy on covers, which—with the notable exception of a seriously rocking take on The Clash’s “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais“—didn’t really move me.

DCist’s reviewer was less impressed, but what I actually wanted to call out was this:

On previous albums Keep It Like A Secret and Perfect From Now On, when tracks pushed past the five minute mark, they were often songs within songs, shifting through a number of melodic guises before returning home for some kind of impassioned finale. Their latest release, You in Reverse, takes the band one step further. I may be loath to admit it, but what we now have here is a jam band.

As someone who came to indie rock after years as a Phish-following hippie kid, I my first reaction was: What do you mean “what we now have”? What the reviewer seems to think is a difference between earlier BtS and jam bands—the division of long instrumentals into “songs within songs”—is a perfectly familiar feature of the genre: It’s typical to see fans give colloquial names to the different “movements” within a long song (e.g. the “Marco Esquandolas” section of “Run Like an Antelope”), within which jamming tends to proceed within the loose constraints of that movement’s sound-world.

Maybe it’s just that my aesthetic trajectory here makes it more obvious to me, but I think it’s no accident that the first indie album I really got into was Perfect from Now On, with its extended, meandering instrumentals. And, for that matter, if you had played me the ten-minute-long first track off the new Yo La Tengo Album before it was released and claimed it were from a “Slave to the Traffic Light” jam during the 1994 Phish tour, I might well have believed it. This is the dirty secret I think a lot of indie fans are, as the reviewer put it, “loath to admit”: Lots of the most interesting indie rock—which is to say, beyond the large number of vaguely indistinguishable floppy-haired dudes strumming the same three chords—you’re talking about a tradition that probably owes as much to Jerry Garcia as it does to Ian MacKaye.