7. Ancient Melodies Of The Future (2001)

“Strange” is a wonderful song — so much glorious noise weaves in and out of its simplistic chord changes — but the opener’s ambling approach suggests Ancient Melodies Of The Future will be significantly less ambitious than the powerhouse trio of LPs that preceded it. The rest of the record bears that out. Built To Spill keeps laying the textural tricks on thick, but no amount of window fog can obscure the B-side quality of most tracks here. Very few of the gauzy song-smears that comprise the bulk of the tracklist are outright bad, but their combined effect is the type of fatigue that comes from too much sleep. When they do crank up the energy, as on “Happiness” and the obnoxiously catchy “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss,” the late-’90s alternative radio summer jam pep is whiplash-inducing. And it’s a shame they squandered a genius line like “As long as it’s talking with you/ Talk of the weather will do” on a dud like “The Weather,” but considering the subject matter, maybe mundane was the point.