On paper, Wilco sounds like the kind of band that shouldn’t, or couldn’t, exist in a world where the vast majority of people are perfectly happy with the latest from Taylor Swift or Nickelback.
Wilco is not comprised of rock stars, or anyone who looks like a rock star. Most of the band members look like guys you’d see at the hardware store, picking up a couple of double-key deadbolts and some caulk. They don’t have hit singles and still play theaters instead of arenas.
Wilco is instead a band that blends the experimental with the familiar, writing obtuse songs with largely indecipherable meanings while moving easily from the swirl of a pretty melody to a wall of electronic noise or guitars that sometimes sound like teeth being pulled.
And yet each of Wilco’s studio albums has charted higher than the last, with 2007’s “Sky Blue Sky” debuting at No. 4 on Billboard’s album charts. Wilco’s seventh studio album, “Wilco (The Album),” was released Tuesday (over-eager fans pirated it weeks ago) and will almost certainly land in the Top 10.
How did this happen? Your guess is as good anyone’s, but every once in a while a band finds critical and commercial success despite the odds. This decade has two, Radiohead being the other. The difference between the bands, however, is that you actually want to listen to Wilco as opposed to feeling like you should listen to Radiohead. So if Wilco is the American Radiohead, we got the better of the deal.
“Wilco (The Album)” isn’t quite as straightforward as “Sky Blue Sky,” although the title and opening track, “Wilco (The Song),” are rare sense-of-humor sightings. Traditional song structure is still the foundation but things can get tricky, often in ways that are so subtle you may not notice at first.
Tweedy said when making "Wilco (The Album)” that his intent was to use the studio “as another instrument,” but the result doesn’t clarify what he was after. There is some splicing and dicing, and some sounds have clearly been massaged, but how is that different from any Wilco album since “Being There”?
The most obvious experimentation is on “Bull Black Nova,” where keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen creates an aggressive series of spare, pounding piano parts that are eventually obliterated by guitarist Nels Cline, who continues to redefine rock ’n’ roll guitar by combining the freak-out with the sublime. “Deeper Down” is also tricked out, with its series of short, sharp verses held together by layers of sonic frippery.
Cline, who was breathtaking on “Sky Blue Sky,” isn’t featured as much here although he does provide most of the headphone moments. Jorgensen is the secret weapon this time, whether hammering the piano like Fats Domino, splashing flashy major chords like Roy Bittan, or playing David Briggs to Tweedy’s Neil Young.
And make that 1970s Young, which was a shifting mixture of sadness, bitter dillusionment, brutal honesty and a crooked-grin sense of humor. It feels similar to Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” especially when Tweedy pays penance on several songs, although it’s never clear why or to whom. The results are striking.
On “One Wing,” over a delicate Cline guitar part, Tweedy sings, “You were a blessing and I was a curse/I did my best not to make things worse for you/That isn’t true.” The truth comes harder on “Solitaire,” where he admits to a damaging sense of superiority in the album’s sweetest sounding song: “I took too long too long to say I was wrong to believe in me only.”
But by album’s end, Tweedy’s back is up and he’s refusing to not believe the best — with qualifications. “Don’t try to tell me my everlasting love is a lie,” he quietly berates someone on “Everlasting Everything,” but the sentiment is cut by the ominous tolling of a bell and an ambiguous pay-off: “Oh, nothing could mean anything at all.”
The song, which is otherwise almost folky sounding, goes out on a slippery tangle of Cline’s effects-laden guitar that draws it away from traditional songwriting and toward Wilco’s adventurous side. It’s Wilco’s career in miniature, a full circle from the plain three-chord Americana of 1995’s “A.M.” through the abstract detours of 2002’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” to now, a potent combination of both that stirs up the past while flirting with the future.
