Fourteen years into its career, Built To Spill finds itself in a curious spot: In an era in which indie artists sell like major label acts, it’s a major label act still selling like an indie.

This isn’t altogether surprising, knowing a bit about the band’s history. Doug Martsch formed Built To Spill in 1992, right at the height of Nirvana hysteria. A Boise, Idaho, native, Martsch was already an established figure in the Pacific Northwest underground scene as a member of such revered local acts as the Tree People and the Halo Benders.

Recording for local tastemaker labels Up and K Records, Built To Spill won heaps of critical praise, and Warner Bros. picked it up in 1996. It turned out to have been the kind of judgment lapse that regularly visits major labels as they try to anticipate what will be the next underground sound to spill over into the mainstream.

In Built To Spill’s case, it was a matter of bad timing as much as bad judgement. The band was too late to ride the coattails of Pacific Northwest grunge giants Nirvana, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden, and too early to take advantage of the changed dynamics that allowed more recent Seattle bands like Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie to become commercial successes. (Both are now also on major labels.) But Built To Spill is the vital link between the two periods. It slowed and cooled the molten guitars of grunge, creating a sound that was meandering rather than menacing, contemplative instead of confrontational.

With its improvisational live sets – where six-minute songs stretch to 45 minutes – you could imagine Built To Spill becoming a kind of post-grunge version of the Grateful Dead. If Martsch didn’t hate touring, that is. Still, an active tape-trading culture has grown up around the band, and its 2000 “Live” album is probably the best thing it has ever recorded.

“You in Reverse” (Warner Bros.), its first new album in five years, goes some way to capturing the organic, free-form energy of the band’s live sound.The group jammed for hours on end in Martsch’s garage to discover the sound that defines it today. Martsch then took his favorite parts from those jams and rearranged them into the songs collected here.

“Just a Habit” sounds like Dean Wareham’s guitar work from his Galaxie 500 days – fuzzy, dreamy, and slow evolving. “Wherever You Go” recalls the epic, reverberating sound of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer,” a song Built To Spill covered on its live album, drawing it out more than 20 minutes. “Gone” is a guitar song derailed; three minutes in, a pipe organ playing a flouncing carnival tune floats through the song like a stray thought. The song’s attention follows. This song alone demonstrates the volatile, capricious nature of Built To Spill’s best music: Songs change from moment to moment and end just as their ideas are exhausted and not a moment before.

Martsch has always maintained that his lyrics are an afterthought – to the extent he thinks about them at all. They’re made up to fit the meter and fill the space. “I wish someone else would write lyrics for me,” he once told Rolling Stone.

But this reluctant lyricist is an underrated one – at least by himself. Martsch’s past work is full of koan-like lines that contemplate eternity and human motivation: “just this side of love is where you’ll get the confidence not to continue”; “you said something funny the other day / you said you can’t make you laugh”; “God is whoever you’re performing for.”

“You in Reverse” is rife with many such small profundities and sideways observations, although they’re easily missed in the slurry of guitars. “Some things you can’t explain / like why we’re all embracing conventional wisdom in a world that’s just so unconventional,” Martsch sings on the song titled “Conventional Wisdom.”The message is vaguely political, the circuitous logic vaguely Rumsfeldian. “They don’t know they’re wrong / but you know that they never concede that,” he sings, “that’s what makes them strong / that they know that we’ll never see.”

It’s also the most conventional pop song on the album, built on a chugging bass line and sprightly riff. At 3 1/2 minutes, it could have been a commercial-radio contender, but it clocks in at almost six and a half with a long, noodling middle section. It’s the kind of song you expect Warner Bros. would have fought them to change 10 years ago. It seems the label has learned, as Martsch has, not to question where the music goes.

Built To Spill is scheduled to play three nights (October 4-6) at Irving Plaza this fall.