Music: Wilco * * * *
Wilco (The Album) (Nonesuch)
POSITIVE: Wilco's album has moments of fragile delicacy
Friday June 26 2009
You've got to hand it to Jeff Tweedy, Wilco's frontman. When this, their seventh album leaked online about two months ago, Tweedy didn't do what most other musicians of his stature would and complain bitterly in the media about how vile the internet is or bring forward the release date of the album to maximise sales.
Instead, he made the songs freely available to stream on the band's website, but asked downloaders to make a contribution to a charity that helps homeless people in his native Chicago.
It's a mature response that reflects very well on Tweedy and his band and one that's very much in keeping with the upbeat, largely positive, vibe on this album. Much of it is gentle and wistful -- characteristics of their underwhelming previous album, 2007's Sky Blue Sky -- but there's a vitality and sense of fun here that was missing from their last release.
Recorded in New Zealand, there are touches of that country's much-loved Crowded House -- not least in the power pop opener Wilco (The Song), which offers a neat precis of Wilco's career to date, and in One Wing, which showcases Tweedy's ability to marry the loveliest of melodies with moving words, à la Neil Finn.
There's real beauty here, not least in You and I, which finds Tweedy and Leslie Feist offering up a quite delightful duet inspired by a couple trying to keep a fractious relationship together, and in Solitaire, which is resplendent with fragile slide and acoustic guitars.
There are some remnants of the Radiohead-meets-Americana music that Wilco made in the middle part of this decade when Tweedy was troubled with a painkiller addiction -- Bull Black Nova is an edgy, anxious song that tells the story of a man who has killed his girlfriend from his point of view. Its appearance is something of an anomaly among the more conventional folk rock songs here, but as a stand-alone composition it's as special as anything in the band's catalogue.
Wilco (The Album) may not be the group's best album -- 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot still gets that nod -- but Tweedy's muse continues to burn brightly.
Burn it: You and I; Bull Black Nova; Solitaire
- John Meagher
