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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summer Teeth (Reprise, 1999) is a studio product that relies heavily on
keyboards and electronic sounds. It hardly relates to roots-rock anymore.
It is closer in spirit (if not in technique) to the
baroque pop of Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and to the
epic psychedelia of Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde.
Can't Stand It limps around a syncopated beat and a jazzy piano figure,
the refrain enhanced by a bluesy organ.
She's A Jar begins as a Dylan-esque, martial meditation, but the
refrain is pure pop of the cheesiest kind (a pompose mellotron simulating
the orchestra).
A Shot In The Arm borders dangerously on Beatles-ian morosity,
and When You Wake Up Feeling Old flirts with the shoddiness of
Broadway's show tunes,
and Pieholden Suite offers a dreadful cross between the Beatles
and Bacharach,
but the piano-based gospel We're Just Friends is quite mesmerizing in the
way it weaves Bob Dylan and David Bowie together in the same tune, one of
Tweedy's most subtle interpretations.
The album is a giant tribute to the smiling faces of the Sixties.
The upbeat I'm Always in Love (that borrows the Velvet Underground's
boogie pace)
and the march-like Nothing's Ever Gonna Stand In My Way
hark back to bubblegum music's one-hit wonders and to Merseybeat's teenage
novelties.
Countless nuances are taken from the canon of the Beatles.
There are only a few moments when Tweedy returns to his previous self, like the
pensive singer songwriter of Via Chicago (with atmospheric guitar by
the same Tweedy).
Despite the flaws, this is a groundbreaking album
that restores faith in the possibility of honest pop music.
Coomer quit Wilco to join Swag, the supergroup formed by the Mavericks'
Robert Reynolds and Jerry Dale McFadden.
Jeff Tweedy also composed the soundtrack to the film
Chelsea Walls (Rykodisc, 2002):
five songs (which are really leftovers from previous Wilco albums and
only two of which feature him) and seven instrumental tracks.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Nonesuch, 2002), named after a track off the
legendary Conet Project, and originally
released on the Internet in 2001 after being rejected by their label, is Wilco's
experimental album, all eccentric arrangements and skewed melodies.
This majestic nonsense blends late, spaced-out
Byrds
and Sticky Fingers-era Stones
(I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,
in which a dissonant carillon of toy piano eventually coalesces into a soaring
melody),
Lalena-era Donovan and She's So Cold-era Stones (Kamera),
Kinks and Todd Rundgren (Heavy Metal Drummer),
catchy Mersey-sound and noisy rhythm'n'blues (I'm the Man Who Loves You),
Grateful Dead and Simon & Garfunkel (War on War),
Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac (Jesus Etc),
and so on.
Experiments abound in every song, and turn Radio Cure and
Poor Places into chamber pieces embedded within a casually careening
song.
Far from being a mere exercise in style, this album is also one of Tweedy's most
personal statements, offering a scathing and disturbing wall-size portrait
of the tragic times following September 11 (Ashes Of American Flags,
the lengthy psychodrama Reservations that ends with an eerie
instrumental elegy).
Wilco continues to move away from "alt-country", along the path opened
by Summer Teeth.
The contribution of keyboardist Jay Bennett must have been crucial, but he
left the band soon after completing this album.
Jeff Tweedy surrounded himself with
Boxhead Ensemble's drummer
Glenn Kotche and guitarist Jim O'Rourke on
Loose Fur (Drag City, 2003). The trio is not particularly creative,
despite indulging in extended tracks, or entertaining, despite grounding
the songs into simple melodies.
The playing is too sloppy, slow and detached.
Hearing Tweedy whisper Laminated Cat over a light boogie rhythm and
discretely twanging guitars is not particularly exciting.
Elegant Transaction is a morphing folk-jazz ballad that is more
"elegance" than "transaction".
Chinese Apple, possibly the best vocal number, updates Donovan's
fragile lullabies to bossanova-inspired post-rock.
All the guitar doodling, with its fake-avantgarde pretensions, adds up to
very little (as the instrumental Liquidation Totale proves).
The notable exception is the four-minute coda to the
Neil Young-ian ballad So Long, whose atonal counterpoint turns into
heavenly CSN&Y harmonies the same way a lens goes from unfocused to focused.
Dynamics, shading and juxtaposition upset the frail, pastoral, melodic
cartilage of these slow, lengthy madrigals.
Each song is a sonic decay, an impediment to the development of a real song.
Which is both "art" and the negation of art.
Loose Fur's Born Again In The USA (Drag City, 2006) gets stuck in
a kind of quirky and erudite folk-rock that is cohesive and is not
attractive. It requires some thinking, but the more one pays attention
to the poppy Stupid As The Sun and Hey Chicken
the less excited one gets.
The musical personas of
Jeff Tweedy, Jim O'Rourke and Glenn Kotche truly coalesce only in the post-rock
essay Wreckroom and in the
instrumental An Ecumencial Manner.
The vocals and the lyrics are effective repellents throughout the album.
Glenn Kotche's first solo album, Introducing (Locust, 2002), was an experiment in free-form electroacoustic percussion-based music.
Next (Quakebasket, 2004) continued the experiment, but the tracks were
too short to be more than sketchy.
Mobile (2006) was a much more experimental work, focusing on rhythm
and repetition, almost a treatise on minimalism from the viewpoint of a drummer
(Clapping Music Variations, Mobile Parts 1 & 2,
Reductions Or Imitations).
Kotche created an unlikely blend of ethnic, glitch, jazz and minimalist music.
Wilco's bassist John Stirratt and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone formed
Autumn Defense and released The Green Hour (Broadmoor, 2001) and
Circles (Arena Rock, 2003).
Retreating from the experimental orgy of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco
turned A Ghost Is Born (Nonesuch, 2004) into their most pensive,
introspective, melancholy album.
The experiments (the lengthy guitar-heavy prog-rock rumination of Spiders,
possibly Jeff Tweedy's best guitar moment,
and the
lengthy Neil Young-ian coda of Less Than You Think) sound out of context,
and a bit indulgent (their length is unjustified, other than to fill the
disc).
The poppy tunes (Hummingbird, Muzzle of Bees) are just
that: trivial pop.
The rest is uniformly Wilco-esque, i.e. dejavu.
The album was the band's greatest commercial success, entering the top-1o charts.
Wilco's multi-instrumentalist
Jay Bennett had already released The Palace at 4am (Undertow, 2002), a collaboration with Edward Burch, and the mediocre Bigger Than Blue (2004).
He then
exorcised his ghosts with the aching ballads of
The Beloved Enemy (2004) and
The Magnificent Defeat (2006).
Jeff Tweedy further steered Wilco towards mainstream laid-back country-rock (with
eerie 1970s overtones) on Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch, 2007), despite
the addition of
jazz-rock guitar titan Nels Cline.
Nostalgic (Side With The Seeds, with one of Cline's best solos), senile (On And On And On) and
childish (What Light, the songs cannot shake the drowsiness that
permeates them from the very beginning (Either Way) to the languid
Impossible Germany (despite the lengthy guitar jam).
Cline has rarely been so misused in his career (You Are My Face is the other song where he shines).
This sextet with drummer Kotche, bassist Stirrat, keyboardist Jorgensen, multi-instrumentalist Sansone and Cline would remain the Wilco lineup for more than a decade.
The standouts of
Wilco (The Album) (Nonesuch, 2009) are the placid country-rock
lament You And I,
You Never Know (drenched in pummeling-piano emphasis a` la Bruce Springsteen),
and Wilco The Song
the archetype for the diligent and accomplished pop tunes
of the album
(with a rhythmic progression worthy of the
Rolling Stones and a soaring hook).
The hidden gem might be Solitaire, a barely audible confession
embedded in the most naked ambience of the album.
However, the tenderly subdued Deeper Down
and the slightly neurotic Bull Black Nova
are emblematic of how the band stretches simple ideas to the limit in the
least spontaneous of manners.
The slow ballad Country Disappeared
and the languid elegy
Everlasting Everything
are second-rate muzak.
Glenn Kotche was also active in the instrumental side-project
On Fillmore, a collaboration with
Brise-Glace's upright bassist Darin Gray.
They debuted with the avantgarde
On Fillmore (2002), containing
the three-part suite Cave Crickets,
the three-part suite Beautiful Funeral and especially
the 16-minute Captive Audience for vibraphone and bass,
and followed up with
the more serene and quasi-ambient
Sleeps with Fishes (2004), containing the 12-minute Hikali,
the eight-minute Taisho, and the ten-minute Doitsu.
Their third album,
Extended Vacation (Dead Oceans, 2009),
begins with Checking In, a brief overture in which
vibraphone, bass, birds and an odd arsenal of objects engage in a
playful dance.
The gentle melody of the six-minute Master Moon is spoiled by
the found objects to the point that it feels like hearing
Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake performed by a troupe of gypsies.
An even more angelic vibraphone melody permeates the
eleven-minute Daydreaming So Early. For a while it coexists
peacefully with bird sounds, but then strange noises erupt in the background
(even a marching band)
and disrupt the harmony.
The seven-minute Complications minimizes both the music and the
noise until almost the end, when ghostly reverbs, echoes and drones
sweep everything away.
The jazzier twelve-minute Extended Vacation tries a bit too hard to
create complexity out of simplicity succeeding only in the madcap coda.
The Whole Love (Anti, 2011) was their most eclectic, chaotic and confused
work yet, ranging from
the country elegy Open Mind to the
stomping vaudeville skit Capitol City,
from the power-pop ditty Dawned on Me to
the rock'n'roll rave-up Standing O,
from the catchy single I Might to the acid piano ballad Sunloathe,
and from the morbid acoustic meditation Rising Red Lung to the
mood piece Black Moon.
None of this is essential, but it is all performed with great elegance and
instrumental dexterity. The stellar axis of
guitarist Nels Cline and drummer Glenn Kotche works wonders throughout the
album, but is a little wasted in these mediocre tributes to disparate genres.
Multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone and keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen play
a role in expanding the combo's horizons in the more ambitious pieces:
the graceful 12-minute post-rock acoustic pastiche One Sunday Morning
(a` la Less Than You Think, sort of Bob Dylan's Sad Eyed Ladies
or Neil Young's Ambulance Blues for the digital age) and the
schizophrenic seven-minute prog-rock mini-opera Art of Almost
(programmed beats, strings, and plenty of dissonance from Cline).
In this album the sextet reached the point that the impeccable instrumental
skills overcame any limitation in the compositions.
What's Your 20 (2014) is a double-disc anthology.
Wilco's Star Wars (dBpm, 2015) perfected the eclectic romanticism of
The Whole Love and possibly stands as their best since
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Perhaps the brief Beefheart-ain instrumental EKG was meant as proof
that the band has come together for real.
The band coalesces around the anthemic John Lennon-esque singalong More,
the syncopated glam-rock a` la T.Rex Random Name Generator,
the apocalyptic Bob Dylan-ian tone of The Joke Explained (a jaunty melody that could have sat next to Absolutely Sweet Marie on Blonde on Blonde),
the desolate Lou Reed-ian mantra You Satellite (with a lengthy cosmic instrumental coda),
and Pickled Ginger, a mix of Suicide-style psychobilly and Deep Purple-ian boogie.
The rest is filler, even though the alt-country ballad King Of You,
the poignant pastoral Where Do I Begin,
and the somber mellotron-driven lament Magnetized
(which piano figures lift it into A Day in the Life territory)
would have been standouts on some of their more mediocre albums.
Schmilco (2016) is a much more laid-back and lightweight album,
a step back to the lazy, half-baked sound of Sky Blue Sky.
The Donovan-esque lullaby Normal American Kids and the graceful country-rock ballad If I Ever Was a Child
set the pace.
Cry All Day boasts a boogie locomotive but mixed with a melancholy melody worthy of the Everly Brothers.
Luckily, Cline's avantgarde guitar punctures the somnolent Common Sense and drowns the skeletal Quarters.
The standout is perhaps the least serious song, the bluesy singalong novelty Nope.
The album contains too much filler, notably the silly Mersey-beat ditty
Locator that ended up chosen as the lead single.
It was a sign that the band had reached another point of saturation.
Jeff Tweedy released four solo albums:
the double-disc Sukierae (2014), which contains mostly filler;
Together at Last (2017), a collection of unplugged and unassuming Wilco songs transformed into late-night bonfire lullabies;
Warm (2018), an uneven parade of pensive tunes that range from
Eagles-ian country-rock (Don't Forget), Tom Petty-esque
folk-rock (I Know What It's Like),
bleak Neil Young-ian dirges (How Hard it is for a Desert to Die)
and Beatles-ian nursery rhymes (Let's Go Rain);
and Warmer (2019), recorded during the same session.
The latter is the better one. Mostly preoccupied with
laid-back meditations, it is anchored in
the Greenwich Village movement of the 1960s, whether the melodic side of it
(Evergreen,
Landscape) or the darker Dylan-ian side of it (Orphan), with
nods at the Byrds in Empy Head
and at the more country-ish Grateful Dead in Family Ghost.
He also published his memoir, "Let's Go" (2018).
Wilco's Ode to Joy (dBpm, 2019), recorded by the same
six-piece lineup in place since Sky Blue Sky,
The skeletal arrangements of An Empty Corner and
Bright Leaves sculpt desolate trembling atmospheres, with Tweedy's
voice at its most vulnerable, but the
the waltzing singalong Love Is Everywhere and the calypso-infected White Wooden Cross
sound like high-school pranks.
Other than
Cline's Indian-style solo of We Were Lucky there is little to show
the skills and creativity of this legendary sextet.
Wilco's 21-song double album Cruel Country (2022)
is a challenging slog.
The mid-tempo melodies over country-ish rhythm recall
latter-day Byrds,
from the stately Please Be Wrong
to the anemic eight-minute Many Worlds,
from the whispered Bird Without A Tail/ Base Of My Skull
to the Dylan-ian Mystery Binds,
but sometimes even
the Flying Burrito Brothers
(A Lifetime To Find, Falling Apart)
and Gram Parsons
(Story To Tell, the melodic zenith).
Of the 21 songs, 15 or 16 could have easily been left out.
Most of these songs are bland and devoid of either emotion or atmosphere.
The general feeling of mediocrity and routine dissipates only in a couple
of atmospheric and emotional songs: the
funereal Darkness Is Cheap and the noir Tonight's The Day.
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