Rock Guitar That Charges Ahead

Rock needs its guitar heroes--those rare artists who can galvanize a crowd by summoning drama and excitement from their instrument. By all rights, Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch should be included in that pantheon. He’s managed to inject fresh life into guitar-centric rock by emphasizing texture over technique. At the Roxy on Friday, Martsch and his Boise-based band delved into guitar rock’s vocabulary of styles and came up with some fascinating new variations on familiar themes.

As a songwriter, Martsch restlessly rifles through ideas within the space of a single composition. His songs, many of which can stretch for more than 28 minutes, may start out with the epic sweep of arena-rock and then downshift into a placid finger-picking interlude, or make a detour into noisy power-chord raunch.

At the Roxy, Martsch’s guitar led the charge, threading a vaguely Asian, octave-splitting motif through the stately “Center of the Universe,” plucking fluttering, bird-like sounds on “Else” and pounding out a serpentine, quasi-metal riff on “You Were Right.” At other times, Martsch lay back and anchored melodies while auxiliary guitarist Brett Netson bent and twisted notes or provided keening slide-guitar lines.

Through it all, Martsch’s appealingly reedy voice soared above his dense constructs. By deftly balancing formal experimentation with high-decibel exuberance, Built to Spill demonstrated why it is among rock’s most forward-thinking bands of the moment.