Talk to a certain bloke of a certain age and his eyes will go all wispy at the mention of albums such Sonic Youth’s ‘Daydream Nation’, The Pixies’ ‘Surfer Rosa’ or Dinosaur Jr’s ‘Bug’. These are albums which created a surge forward in exciting guitar music, fusing the noise of the hardcore scene with melodies to die for and creating an underground American scene which was sharply distinct from the big label perm-rock predominant in the eighties. It kick started the ‘alternative’ movement in the early nineties, which climaxed with that band begining with an N. However, once the majors started trying to replicate that success, the end was nigh.

However, some of us were hooked. Not on the Stone Temple Pilots and their ilk but just these American bods off in their garages wringing noises out of their guitars that no one else could, writing with humour and passion about little things that meant a lot. There is a lot to be proud of in the British music scene- its energy and movement, its ability to accept the off-kilter and weird - but its guitar bands have always been limited by those very same things, by the need for success, a gimmick and a quick return on their investment. American bands manage to get so much more space into their sound, much more freedom, they seem to reflect the vastness of the country in their diversity and scope.

So, where is all this leading? Well, first to a guy named Doug Martsch. Originally in the Tree People, a Seattle punk band, and then a sort of alternative American supergroup, Halo Benders with Calvin Johnson of K Records. He then formed Built To Spill as a loose collective who now revolve around him, drummer Scott Plouf and bassist Brett Nelson. They originally released ‘What’s Wrong With Love’ on City Slang in November 1995, then released the album they did before that and then, earlier this year, ‘Perfect From Now On’. It’s great. It’s big and wide and has huge long guitar bits where songs start off slow and melodic and end up fast and frenzied. But mainly it has Doug. Doug feeling a bit moody and down, a wonderfully generous, nice guy getting up on the wrong side of bed and doing a song called ‘I Could Hurt A Fly’. A guy promising to himself once more that everything will be ‘perfect from now on’, knowing full well it will be until he cocks it up again.

I ring him up just as he’s about to prepare lunch, so he gets out of that one, and I give him my grand theory about ‘I Could Hurt a Fly’, the fact that it’s this sensitive songwriter guy turning against his image and he says, “Yeah, I never thought of it that way, but yeah, that makes sense.”

The album is far darker and moodier than ‘What’s Wrong..’, which was great in a ‘small songs about life’ kind of way, but ‘Perfect From Now On’ is just a much more ambitious record. So, I try to pin down why the change took place, was it a conscious decision?

“Mostly the kind of the way it turned out was down to unconscious things. Just the way you are making music. Part of it was conscious too. I kind of wanted to make a record that was kind of long and has long songs on it, that’s more, I don’t know, serious-sounding than our other records”.

It starts with a song called ‘Randy Describes Eternity’, in which the gulf between the finite and the infinite is explored. It’s a bit epic, if you know what I mean. Lyrically, the whole album seems to approach much bigger subjects then its predecessors.

“The lyrics are always the last thing to come and are mostly nonsense. Some things that make sense now and then, but mostly just words that fit the rhythm,” says Doug with a chuckle, being characteristically downbeat. “I have melodies, or sometimes odd words that end up being used. Or just words that I make up on the spot just to fit the melody and that end up being stuck in the song.”

I have a feeling that I’m not really going to get to the bottom of this, so I move on to the subject of this article. Do you think there is a general resurgence in American underground music?

“Yeah, there are just some incerdible bands that sound, to me, as fresh as the Pixies or Dinosaur Jr did.” And do you think it’s linked with those original bands?

“Sure, yeah, those are the things that influenced me a lot. They took what I thought was cool about punk and what I thought was cool about classic rock and mixed them together in a way that appealed to me.”

Another band who have released a stunning new album this year are Yo La Tengo. ‘I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One’ is their eighth album and is their most assured to date. Comprising Ira Kaplan, sometime rock journalist, on guitar and vocals, Georgia Hubley on drums and vocals and James McNew on bass, they have produced an album that shows why they have been around for so long. Combining most strands of the alternative American scene at the moment, it exists on a base of mellow grooves and textured feedback which combines the guitar trickery of Sonic Youth and Dinosuar Jr with the rhythmic fixation of Tortoise and Krautrock pioneers Can. The gorgeously repetitive ‘Moby Octopad’ sits next to the relatively straightforward guitar pop of ‘Sugarcube’, as the album mutates and develops, creating melodic soundscapes that ease your worries away. Oh, and the combination of Ira’s Lou Reed-type vocals and Georgia’s singing is one of the most beautiful sounds on record. However, the most amazing thing about the album is its depth of musical styles.

“I think it’s kind of a natural progression for us to be more and more diverse, or at least to be able to play in different styles and to try to still be the same people even though we’re using different styles. We’ve done that a little more successfully, maybe. It’s hard to say,” comments Georgia, “I think it’s more interesting for us to try and play in ways we’ve never played before and to teach yourself how to play a new beat or something or play something on organ that you’ve never played before”.

‘Autumn Sweater’, the single from the album, was released as a twelve-inch with remixes from some of the folk at Tortoise, as well as Musique and Jim O’Rourke. It seems that Yo La Tengo are the link from bands such as Built To Spill to the experimental side of American rock music.

“We did it [remixing] once before, although I think this is more satisfying than the other time when we weren’t so wild about the remixes. It’s kind of intriguing, the idea of someone taking something you’ve done and putting their stamp on it ... especially the Musique remix as that’s someone we don’t even know. But I liked how it came out actually. It’s pretty good”.

They are the ideal rock band to be remixed in this way, as their songs have a loose structure similar to that of these type of ‘sound freaks’.

“There are certainly a lot of songs like that, and that’s probably what we are most drawn to and when we write songs that’s how they come about. Just from an instrumental repetitive melodic line and then you structutre the song and the melody round that.”

Of course, all this is very well and good, but occasionally it’s nice to remember what rock music is all about in its more primal form. “Personally, with rock and roll music when you go to see a band live, each person has their own personality and they each have their own particular nuances, so everything doesn’t have to be really loud or everything doesn’t have to be really bassy or whatever. It makes you move a different way and it’s...sweat. It’s more sweaty and more primal.” This from the band who have a song whose chorus goes; “Oh Natalie, Natalie, I want to see your anatomy baby” followed by the retort, “You can touch, but you can’t look”. This from the band who call themselves Railroad Jerk. This from the band whose bassist Tony Lee says, when asked how to describe the noise his band makes, “Last year we said contruction site blues, this year we say gangsta folk”.

This is the band who, with last year’s ‘The Third Rail’ and the previous ‘One Track Mind’, have produced two albums about sex. Oh and wearing clean shirts. They’re Baggage favourites, by the way.

“I’m hi-fi but low-brow” sings Marcellus Hall on the opening line of ‘One Track Mind’. Tony adds, “I mean, mistakes are beautiful, you know. A few songs on the new record were recorded live in our almost acoustic set-up, with songs like ‘Natalie’ and ‘Another Night At The Bar’ and ‘Sweet Librarian’, as well. We basically get everything down live and then use overdubs here and there, but those three songs we had a set-up with junk percussion and certain other things. We sometimes do a live show with one electric guitar, two acoustic ones and then junk percussion.”

The things about all these bands are that they probably will never sell huge amounts of records, but they will always make good ones and the music scene is developing to such a point that this is possible. “I think anybody who is being honest with their music is pretty good, maybe there are more people being honest and maybe there are more avenues open for people, as anything now can be commercially successful. If that was your main goal a few years ago you’d have to produce something really well-polished, or something dictated by the record company, but now I think people who want to play music can do what they want to do. They don’t have to follow some kind of formula and, of course, once something is successful, for example Nirvana, then you’ll have fifteen or twenty or a thousand spin-off bands or bands that sound like that, but that’s only because the A&R people are always trying to find the next big thing”.

This is the thing. You’ll always have British bands going on about longevity and wanting to make classic albums, but our music system is not geared up for that. Yeah, bands can do it, but they disappear out of the music press pretty quickly. However, something about the American network of indie labels and College radio allows bands more time to develop their sound and to plough their own individualistic furrow, creating albums-worth of great stuff. It allows a diversity in sound, from Swell’s perfection of the four-square indie rock to Girls Against Boys’ double-barrelled bass assult that is not fashion-based and where, at any one point, anything goes. So, as we export some of our best dance stuff across the Atlantic it’s worth thinking about what we want in exchange. Bands like these or those like No Doubt? Well, you can gather my choice.

Built to Spill, Yo La Tengo and Railroad Jerk were talking to Ben, in June 1997.