Rating: 3 stars (out of 4)
Wilco’s latest album, “Wilco (The Album)” (Nonesuch), is a mostly modest collection of sturdy songs, long on craft and nuance. But there are two surprises --- one nightmarish, the other humorous – that give it punch.
The Chicago sextet’s seventh studio album, which has been streaming on the band’s Web site and is now widely available on the Internet in anticipation of a June 30 release, arrives just as news surfaces that former band member Jay Bennett died in his sleep over the Memorial Day weekend at the age of 45. Bennett and Wilco founder Jeff Tweedy were once close collaborators and friends, and their parting in 2001 remains a divisive moment in the band’s history.
The current band is very different from the one they shared. It is the most technically accomplished of Wilco’s many lineups and the longest-lived, together since 2005, and “Wilco (the Album)” is a compendium of its best moves. It breaks little ground, but it does what it does well.
If anything defined the first five Wilco albums, it was a thread of anxiety and uneasiness, which couldn’t help but mirror Tweedy’s own real-life struggles with migraine headaches and drug addiction. On the 2007 “Sky Blue Sky,” the band found renewed pleasure in live interplay, a modest statement of friends making music in real time that acted as a kind of balm.
The new album picks up on that thread, but sets it against a more varied musical backdrop. The characters in Tweedy’s new songs are adults struggling to find a small place in the world. These songs offer few big pronouncements. They are snapshots of moments, and the singer and his bandmates are well-suited to coloring in the details. The sextet suggests more of a mini-orchestra than a band: John Stirratt’s elegantly agile bass playing, Nels Cline’s multitude of guitar voicings, Glenn Kotche’s shades of percussion. Tweedy’s confiding tone has only gotten more nimble over the years, whether he’s singing in a whisper or jumping into a falsetto cry.
The music promises “the comfort of a kiss” for the defeated boxer in “Deeper Down,” swathed in a lovely, chamber-pop arrangement augmented by harpsichord and sighing lap-steel guitar. In the soul ballad “Country Disappeared,” the troubled lovers “turn our faces up to the sun.” “
“You and I” explores a fragile bond, as voiced by Tweedy and guest vocalist Feist. The song’s sparse simplicity contrasts with the orchestral flourishes of “Everlasting,” which surges with quiet conviction and finishes with a bird-song guitar solo that echoes the Duane Allman-led coda of Derek and the Dominoes’ “Layla.”
Amid these small, gracefully executed moments, two polar-opposite songs define the album. One is a stomach-churning wake-up call:
“It’s in my hair, there’s blood in the sink/ I can’t calm down, I can’t think,” Tweedy blurts on “Bull Black Nova.” Locked inside a funnel cloud of guitar turbulence, he screams like a trapped animal. It is among the most harrowing songs Wilco has ever recorded, and it’s not here for mere shock value. Its explicitness gives the rest of the album a necessary context, a picture of a world gone bad. No wonder the characters in Tweedy’s songs sometimes sound wary, a bit frayed around the edges. They’re living on the edge of this song, and by implication, we all are.
“Wilco (The Song)” is its antidote, a boisterous shot of reassurance. Tweedy sings over a chugging guitar line, “Put on your headphones before you explode/Wilco, Wilco, Wilco will love ya, baby.” It’s both a tongue-in-cheek wink and a blast of feel-good sincerity, riding a wave of guitar drone and punctuated with bell tones. It is that rare thing: an anthem with a sense of humor, a grand statement that doesn’t sound like a grand statement. Listen to it, and try not to smile. That’s what the healing power of music should sound like.
greg@gregkot.com