I'd been aware of Keep It Like A Secret for a while, partly because it was well received critically, and partly because of its extremely cool cover artwork; having taken the plunge, it took me a couple of listens to get my ear in for it (as it always does with this kind of rock) but, having done so, the album is growing on me pretty strongly.
Even though some of the songs are pretty long, the band doesn't muck around with these songs, throwing in plenty of melodies (half-melodies) and hooks (half-hooks) and doing a really good job with that indie-rock thing of taking a song in a number of different directions over its running time while always bringing together the various aspects in some kind of intricate mesh ("The Plan" and "Carry The Zero", two of my favourites, do this particularly effectively). There are guitar heroics a-plenty, and also some nicely spacey cuts ("Else" being the obvious one in that latter regard); drawing on my own musical vocabulary, I'd say they're sort of like Buffalo Tom meets latter-day Dismemberment Plan (though obviously there are antecedents for both of them which may have more directly influenced Built To Spill, and Keep It Like A Secret actually came out in the same year as Emergency & I and before Change).
