Find an event
Wilco
What a bum-out it’d be to see Haruki Murakami penning Hi and Lois or Gerhard Richter painting Precious Moments figurines. Ridiculously creative artists should not be reduced to playing with their medium’s basest forms. Upon hearing Wilco’s latest, a heart sinks when Nels Cline lends his jazzy art-rock finger-scrambling to a Tom Petty knockoff or quirky percussionist Glenn Kotche ditches his dense drum workouts for tepid toe-tapping.
The sorta-eponymous seventh from the reigning Chicago rock champs is a warm, hypoallergenic bath of an album. Mellow-but-upbeat ballads and breezy midtempo rockers fill out the brief wheel-spinning record that rehashes the past couple of releases with diminishing returns.
Among the pleasant soft rock, only four tracks stand out. Unfortunately, two of them—the cheeky cheer-up “Wilco (The Song)” and the saloon-piano stomper “You Never Know”—mimic ’70s classics “Werewolves of London” and “My Sweet Lord.” The other highlights evoke the pretty experimentalism of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Not coincidentally, Jeff Tweedy’s poetry shines brightest on these as well. “I’m in a bull-black Chevy Nova,” the frontman mutters with paranoia as the band envisions Steely Dan as Berlin beatniks on “Bull Black Nova.”
But the beautiful “Deeper Down” is the real gem. “By the end of the bout / He was punched out / His capsized muscles shouting / Deeper down,” sighs Tweedy with the hard-boiled poeticism of Raymond Chandler reading over a chamber ensemble. Plucks and strums tick and interlock in complicated, golden clockwork.
Everything else struggles to capture the same level of detail. The conservative dad-pop framework confines Cline’s guitar in a pressure cooker. In each song, when the L.A. axman finally gets the chance to lay down lines, his notes trill with pent-up restlessness. The solos in “One Wing” and “Sonny Feeling” dart and hum like pesky mosquitoes. Can’t blame them, looking for any sign of flesh or swamp. After the similarly disappointing Sky Blue Sky, with the bar still merely set at pleasant, Wilco seems content to remain LeBron James dunking on a Nerf hoop.
Sing live-band Wilco karaoke at the Hideout’s album-release party on Monday 29.
Comments
There are no comments