3. There’s Nothing Wrong With Love (1994)

Built To Spill released some 7-inches and the early singles collection The Normal Years on indie-pop standard bearer K Records, but the band was never more twee than on There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, their second full-length and first genuinely great record. It’s a charmingly sophomoric sophomore release, fraught with wide-eyed childlike yearning (“Reasons,” “Twin Falls”), cutesy spunk (“Big Dipper,” “In The Morning”) and juvenile pranks (the wonderfully goofy secret track “Preview,” still good for a laugh after all these years). Martsch never sang a more indelible line than the climactic “Car” coda “I wanna see movies of my dreams,” and the pogo-a-gogo chorus of “Dystopian Dream Girl” is one for the ages. The guitar parts throughout are playful and spontaneous, and the songs often veer off into delightful surprise turns. So 19-year-old me struggles to understand how it didn’t come in first place on this Countdown. Trouble is, 29-year-old me finds the record’s lesser segments excruciating. “Fling” comes off like a pre-Bends Radiohead B-side, replete with uncomfortable over-sharing (“It takes me a long time to cum to the memory of us.”) Lyrics like “Wiggly days, wiggly nights” and Martsch’s arrested-development vocal render “Cleo” an intolerably cutesy lullaby from the womb. The dynamic shifts on “Some” (“One guy I know thinks he’s hard to get along with/ BUT A LOT OF PEOPLE THINK HE’S FINE!”) are either awkward or awesome depending on whether Martsch is joking. Still, it’s hard not to appreciate the self-awareness of lyrics like “I wrote a song/ It was slow and long/ I wrote the words and music wrong/ But life goes on.” Despite a few moments when the endearing tips over into the obnoxious, There’s Nothing Wrong With Love is the sound of scrappy mountain manchildren toying with their powers, pushing the limits of their form, setting the table for future tours de force.