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Where's the justification for a live album by a band like Built To Spill?

Judging by the track selection for the band's most recent and quite lengthy (72-minute) release, they are trying to recast themselves as proud guitar travelers in the Crazy Horse tradition. For 17 minutes of "Broken Chairs" and more than 20 minutes of Neil Young's "Cortez The Killer," Doug Martsch solos into oblivion, no doubt in a lone spotlight that the audio-only medium of the compact disc cannot display.

Herein lies the ultimate failure of Live: As a recording, it can only do so much to put the listener into the moment. Built To Spill is a band that strongly differs in its live and recorded incarnations.

On albums Keep It Like A Secret and There's Nothing Wrong With Love, Martsch perfected a way of making his two chief talents work together. Layering plenty of virtuosic guitar overdubs over his simple, memorable song structures, Doug kept his songs concise and interesting. In the live setting, the band elongates the songs and gives Martsch a more direct outlet for his guitar hero leanings.

There's a huge difference between being present while a band jams and listening to a recording of a band jamming. When you're there, you're a part of the experiment. The improvising musicians are taking a chance, stepping away from the set structure of the song. There is a chance they will meander off or dissonantly lose the plot. As a live witness one doesn't know how things will turn out.

Listening to a recording of a five-minute Doug Martsch solo is another thing entirely. You know how it will turn out. If it wasn't a good one, it wouldn't very well be on the record, now would it? Taken away from the single spotlight, where we can't see the sweat-lined brow or the look of concentration on the frantic face, a solo is just a technical exercise.

The three-chord "Cortez The Killer" sucks the wind out of the middle of this record. After pleasant, professional renditions of "The Plan" and "Stop The Show" and a "Randy Described Eternity," which is actually shorter than the album original, Live has a nearly half-hour stretch, consisting of "Cortez" and the seamingly endless Halo Benders tune "Virginia Reel Around The Fountain."

Unfortunately, a decent Love As Laughter cover and a spot-on "Car" aren't enough to redeem Live. The album ends sadly with seventeen minutes of "Broken Chairs," which most listeners are never going to even reach.

Guitar fireworks, Martsch seems to think, are more important than pop tunes. Logic would dictate a band known for well-written songs with flashy guitar overdubs would dump the overdubs when playing live (that's why they're called overdubs, isn't it?) before abandoning the tunes.

It is impossible to say how captivating Built To Spill is in the moment, when Doug actually wrangles those verbose statements from his Fender. It can, however, safely be said that listening to the ten- and fifteen-minute recordings on Live is not much fun at all. I'll put Keep It Like A Secret back on now, thank you.

MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.