When Martsch wails "I've gotta be perfect starting now" during the opening track of BTS's much-anticipated major label debut, "Perfect From Now On," it's hard to tell whether he's making apologies for their rougher-edged indie releases or a tongue-in-cheek promise to act like a major-label star next time around — but only after this last no-compromise hurrah.

After a decade of sloppy if inspired six-string assaults, Martsch and his band have served up a minor masterpiece of pleasantly polished pop symphonies. "Perfect From Now On" is as lush as the Northwestern forest and as patient as a slow-burning log in the fireplace. Most of the tracks clock in at over six minutes and feature extended jams that start and stop on a dime, resolving effortlessly into brilliantly catchy verses and choruses. Listen to the way "Stop the Show" switches gears at the three-minute mark for an example of Martsch's gift for sonic bait-and-switch.

And the man who once sang, "I wanna see movies of dreams" still knows how to turn a good phrase, making BTS sound in turns like the Smashing Pumpkins without the angst or a blasé Jane's Addiction: On the song "I Would Hurt a Fly," Martsch says, "There's a mean bone in my body/It's connected to the problems that I won't take for an answer." It's hardly Dylan, but suitably detached for these oblique days at the wane of the millennium. "Kicked It in the Sun" and "Untrustable/Pt.2 (about someone else)" are also standouts, though maybe too long-winded for America's attention-span-deprived youth.

In his column in the February issue of "Interview," Greil Marcus makes the case that guitar rock is an antiquated, if still popular, genre — offering Nirvana's "From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah" and Counting Crows' "Recovering the Satellites" as proof. In the era of Tricky and Beck, it is indeed difficult to conceive of novel ways to deploy the guitar. But in the deeply textured compositions of "Perfect From Now On," where dirt, twang and warmth interplay in elegant washes of guitar, there's an inspiring glimpse at the few remaining possibilities. If Built to Spill really is striving for perfection, one should hope they don't rid themselves of their best faults in the process.

— Joe Rosenthal

Joe Rosenthal is associate editor of Prodigy Music.