Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Posted by Sam on August 18th, 2010
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Far too much attention has been focused on this album’s tortured history; band makes weird album, label rejects it, band buys it back and puts it out a year later through another arm of the same corporation. For the record, wildly overexcited Radiohead comparisons aside, the album’s not that weird–it merely ventures a bit further down the sonic-shambles roads explored on the band’s previous two releases. As has been noted elsewhere, the most valid reference point for the occasional pop deconstructions of YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT is Big Star’s THIRD/SISTER LOVERS, not Thom Yorke and company.
The most significant factor in this nominal weird-out is the presence of producer Jim O’Rourke, whose avant-rock tendencies loom large here. Nevertheless, beneath the layers of warped keyboards and slow-death guitars, Wilco mastermind Jeff Tweedy has loaded the album with catchy (yes, catchy) tunes that mix the pure power-pop of mid-period Beach Boys and the aforementioned Big Star with the rootsy background of Tweedy’s former group Uncle Tupelo and an unmistakable streak of singer-songwriter melancholy. Don’t be scared away by ridiculous assessments of this as a “difficult” album; any Wilco fan may enter this hotel without trepidation.
Tracklisting
1. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
2. Kamera
3. Radio Cure
4. War On War
5. Jesus, Etc.
6. Ashes of American Flags
7. Heavy Metal Drummer
8. I’m the Man Who Loves You
9. Pot Kettle Black
10. Poor Places
11. Reservations
Professional Reviews
Rolling Stone (5/9/02, pp.71-72) – 4 out of 5 stars – “…An earthy, moving psychedelia, eleven iridescent-country songs about surviving a blown mind and a broken heart….the enchanting sound of things falling apart-and gingerly, doggedly coming together again…”
Spin (1/03, p.70) – Ranked #2 on Spin’s list of 2002’s “Albums of the Year”
Spin (3/02, p.131) – “…The record includes fragments of treated piano, static interference, [and] random noises….YANKEE isn’t your typical Americana or alt-country record…”
Q (May 2002, p.121) – 4 out of 5 stars – “…This elegant, world-weary…album ploughs enthusiastically into the leftfield…”
Uncut (1/03, p.94) – Ranked #4 in Uncut’s “100 Best Albums of the Year” – “…Wilco’s finest, its pretty electronic textures and melodicism making a heartbreaking album…”
CMJ (12/30/02, p.10) – Ranked #5 on CMJ’s “Top 10 of 2002″
CMJ (4/22/02, p.4) – “…[A] beautifully strange mix of organic textures and oblique poetics, all of it gently pulsating with a backwoodsy tech-head feel…”
Mojo (Publisher) (p.26) – Ranked #26 in Mojo’s “100 Modern Classics” — “Jeff Tweedy suffers personal crisis and pines for innocence lost before eventually arriving at a redemption of sorts.”
Mojo (Publisher) (1/03, p.73) – Ranked #4 in Mojo’s “Best Albums of 2002″
Mojo (Publisher) (5/02, p.99) – “…Truly, a remarkable record…”
NME (Magazine) (4/20/02, p.22) – 8 out of 10 – “…it’s a gripping darkness that doesn’t often lift. It’s hard going but worth it, and that is undoubtedly their point.”
Paste (magazine) – “It’s Tweedy’s growth as a lyricist that’s most arreting….Tweedy alternates subtle and startling twists of phrase to paint pictures of intense longing, wistful nostalgia, moments of pure joy and utter despair.”
Wilco – Sky Blue Sky
Posted by Sam on August 18th, 2010
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While Wilco’s fifth studio album, A GHOST IS BORN, didn’t come equipped with quite the same artsy, experimental flourishes as the album’s infamous predecessor, YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT, it made officially clear that the band’s days in the world of alt-country had long since passed. SKY BLUE SKY (2007) finds the band not so much in a holding pattern, but rather a state of artistic contentment. The album moves one step further away from Jim O’Rourke’s atmospheric production style, and finds a pleasant mid-tempo groove that reminds one of PRETZEL LOGIC-era Steely Dan, mid-period Dylan, and even certain elements of John Lennon’s solo work.
Of course this is still Jeff Tweedy’s band, which means SKY BLUE SKY never strays too far from what has emerged as a basic Wilco template. The constantly shifting Chicago ensemble (in its umpteenth incarnation by the album’s release) still displays an instrumental precision and studio professionalism while working within a newfangled roots template, and Tweedy himself remains as searching as always, both lyrically and musically. With nary a rave-up in sight, the album could be criticized for being overly serene, but in a career marked by nearly constant tumult and controversy, it’s more appropriate to see this as Jeff Tweedy’s much needed and well-earned rest.
Tracklisting
1. Either Way
2. You Are My Face
3. Impossible Germany
4. Sky Blue Sky
5. Side with the Seeds
6. Shake It Off
7. Please Be Patient with Me
8. Hate It Here
9. Leave Me (Like You Found Me)
10. Walken
11. What Light
12. On & On & On
Professional Reviews
Rolling Stone (p.87) – 4 stars out of 5 — “[O]ften beautiful, disarmingly simple music; it really sounds like six guys playing in a room, and no doubt that’s how they wanted it.”
Rolling Stone (p.116) – Included in Rolling Stone’s “50 Top Albums of the Year 2007″ — “[There is] a psychedelic grace and communal warmth both in the music…and Tweedy’s lyric optimism.”
Spin (p.89) – 4 stars out of 5 — “[T]his is a near-perfect album by a band that seems, finally, to have found their identity.”
Alternative Press (p.159) – 4 stars out of 5 — “Cline positively smolders, ebbing and flowing between the rest of the band, laying intricate groundwork for these songs…”
Alternative Press (p.128) – Included in Alternative Press’s ‘10 Essential Albums Of 2007′ — “[With] Jeff Tweedy’s ‘I’ve been to hell and back’ vocals and Nels Cline’s delicately constructed fretwork…”
Magnet (p.112) – “Jeff Tweedy has never sounded more at ease than on the aptly named SKY BLUE SKY….The album’s tone is set by the gentle string swells and delicate, jazzy guitar solo punctuating opener ‘Either Way’…”
The Wire (p.68) – “Cline is one of the best things to have happened to Wilco, his improvisational style bringing some spontaneity to the group’s [sound]….SKY BLUE SKY is a step forward for Wilco…”
No Depression (p.87) – “[T]he way Tweedy and company work the details is satisfying, and often inspired. ‘Either Way’ links musical sections together in a manner that lays out the album’s strategies.”
Wilco - Wilco The Album
Posted by Sam on August 7th, 2010
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Though many fans suspected that Wilco’s self-titled seventh studio album would mark a return to the wild cut-and-paste experimentalism of YANKEE FOXTROT HOTEL, the record was in fact more of a piece with its traditional-sounding 2007 predecessor, SKY BLUE SKY. Heavily influenced by `60s and `70s pop music, songs like “Sunny Feeling” and “You Never Know” sounded as if the band might have been finally attempting to score the elusive hit single. Beginning with a powerful riff reminiscent of the Kinks’ “Picture Book,” the disc is all strummy guitars, tinkling keyboards, big choruses, George Harrison-style slide guitar, and stacked harmony vocals, conjuring aural images of bands such as Love, Wings, and Badfinger. Throughout, the songwriting is tight and focused, making WILCO one of the most instantly accessible albums in the Chicago-based group’s catalog.
Tracklisting
1. Wilco (The Song)
2. Deeper Down
3. One Wing
4. Bull Black Nova
5. You and I
6. You Never Know (Single)
7. Country Disappeared
8. Solitaire
9. I’ll Fight
10. Sonny Feeling
11. Everlasting Everything
Professional Reviews
Rolling Stone (p.80) – 4 stars out of 5 — “[A] triumph of determined simplicitiy….What is most striking about the restraint here is the elegance and defiance packed inside.”
Spin (p.79) – “WILCO, the band’s seventh studio effort, treats verse-chorus-verse basics like holy truths….And it’s fantastic.”
Spin (p.28) – Ranked #39 in Spin’s “40 Best Albums Of 2009″ — “Wilco now chart a compelling middle course that makes thorny sentiments go down deceptively easy.”
Alternative Press (p.115) – 4 stars out of 5 — “Wilco continue to reign in their experimental fuzz, focusing more on pretty melodies, upbeat toe-tappers and sweet acoustic numbers for their seventh full-length.”
Dirty Linen (p.57) – “There’s a lucidity to the sound and a sense of mix-and-match variety that haven’t been heard since YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT…”
Billboard (p.34) – “Windows-down anthemic pop like ‘You Never Know’ sits alongside the tense, textural rocker ‘One Wing’ and the dark, pulsating murder-escape drama ‘Bull Black Nova.’”
Paste (magazine) (p.54) – “The album is full of thoughtful, artfully crafted lyrics wrapped in memorable hooks that should stand the test of time.”
Record Collector (magazine) (p.98) – 3 stars out of 5 — “‘Bull Black Nova,’ something of a ‘Spiders’ retooling, is pleasingly motorik…”
Uncut (magazine) – 4 stars out of 5 — “‘Wilco (the song)’ and ‘Sonny Feeling’ have that punchy mix of Big Star powerpop, faint Stones raunch and rock classicism…”
Wilco – Ghost Is Born
Posted by Sam on August 7th, 2010
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A Ghost Is Born represents another giant step in the evolution of Wilco from alternative country pioneers to genre-bashing sonic daredevils. The Chicago band’s second Nonesuch release is full of extended guitar reveries and rave-ups, hushed late night balladry, orchestral pop and beautifully sculpted noise that more than lives up to it;s predecessor, Wilco’s watershed 2002 release, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
A Ghost Is Born sees Wilco continuing its collaborative relationship with Jim O’Rourke, who assisted the band in shaping the intricately textured Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The gifted producer/arranger/musician/member-of-Sonic-Youth has in many ways become an essential component in Wilco’s music-making process, assisting the band as it distills, and ultimately satisfies, its complex musical goals.
Tracklisting
1. At Least That’s What You Said
2. Hell Is Chrome
3. Spiders (Kidsmoke)
4. Muzzle of Bees
5. Hummingbird
6. Handshake Drugs
7. Wishful Thinking
8. Company in My Back
9. I’m a Wheel
10. Theologians
11. Less Than You Think
12. The Late Greats
Professional Reviews
Rolling Stone (p.153) – Included in Rolling Stone’s Top 50 Records Of 2004 – “Here they swerve into an equally shocking, poetic clarity…”
Spin (p.103) – “Languid melodies run second to weird sound gestures, soft-rock murmur, and aural pocket lint….Tweedy doesn’t sound any less sincere than he usually does…” – Grade: B
Spin (p.63) – Ranked #38 in Spin’s “40 Best Albums of the Year” – “[T]his is Wilco at their most organic and instinctual…”
Entertainment Weekly (p.161) – “Rarely has a dose of maturity suited musicians the way it has Wilco….[They] have made their most audacious and riskiest record to date….It has sparkling moments galore.” – Grade:B
Q (p.119) – 3 stars out of 5 – “[It's] more confident, more coherent, yielding an all-enveloping warmth….Tweedy’s songwriting has edged up a gear, too.”
Uncut (p.122) – “[I]ts kinetic power has grown over time….In its singlemindedness, its guitar solos, and its melodic anguish, there are heavy echoes of Neil Young…”
Uncut (p.95) – 5 stars out of 5 – “A GHOST IS BORN feels like a band learning to be spontaneous and unencumbered, and coming up with their most engaging album yet.”
Uncut (p.74) – Ranked #2 in Uncut’s “Best New Albums of 2004″ – “An organic and intuitive record….Exhilarating – and we suspect even greater things are yet to come.”
Uncut (p.125) – 4 stars out of 5 – “[The album] consolidated Wilco’s reputation as both the finest bar band in existence and a bunch of true sonic adventurers.”
Magnet (p.112) – “The album’s gorgeous and smirky second half rewards fans of Wilco’s country and pop…”
The Wire (p.60) – “Musically and lyrically, A GHOST IS BORN is translucent, weightless, supernatural, capable of drifting back and forth across rock’n'roll’s state lines at will…”
CMJ – “[With] longer and more experimental songs and tighter, almost McCartney-like hooks…”
Mojo (Publisher) (p.101) – 4 stars out of 5 – “GHOST is another engrossing, unorthodox record, rattling through styles as deftly and poetically as its chief architect sifts the jottings of his mind.”
Wilco – A.M
Posted by Aaron on October 12th, 2009
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When Uncle Tupelo, the band that defined ’90s alt-country, split into two camps, Jay Farrar’s Son Volt took the relatively arty road while Jeff Tweedy upped the rock & roll grit quotient with Wilco. On Wilco’s debut album, the band sounds righteously ragged, charging along behind Tweedy in a manner suggestive of the rootsier moments of the Stones and/or the Replacements. The occasional appearance of acoustic guitar, banjo or a 2/4 beat serves to remind us of Tweedy’s roots. Still, A.M. has the sound of a band already well on their way to the gloriously chaotic rock & roll nirvana they would reach on the follow-up BEING THERE.
Tracklisting
1. I Must Be High
2. Casino Queen
3. Box Full Of Letters
4. Shouldn’t Be Ashamed
5. Pick Up The Change
6. I Thought I Held You
7. That’s Not The Issue
8. It’s Just That Simple
9. Should’ve Been In Love
10. Passenger Side
11. Dash 7
12. Blue Eyed Soul
13. Too Far Apart
Professional Reviews
Rolling Stone (4/6/95, pp.62-64) – 3.5 Stars – Very Good – “…Wilco have made one hell of a country-guts debut….Just as classic country tells of…real life in everyday language…so does Tweedy’s small-town worldview have an Everyman honesty…”
Entertainment Weekly (4/7/95, pp.89-90) – “…Though [Wilco has] a ’90s bleakness far removed from the sunny romanticism of the Byrds and Poco, [they] are following the same urge as those earlier acts: the need to sink roots into something more nourishing than mere rock & roll flash without losing their edge…” – Rating: B+
Q (9/00, p.135) – Included in Q’s “Best Alt.Country Albums Of All Time” – “…A soundtrack for Midwestern teenagers out doing no good.”
Option (7-8/95, p.146) – “…The vocals are laidback and sometimes even strained, but the delivery only adds to the friendly familiarity of the album….Herein lies evidence that A.M. is as sound lyrically as it is musically…”
Village Voice (2/20/96) – Ranked #34 in Village Voice’s 1995 Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll.
Wilco – Summerteeth
Posted by Aaron on September 17th, 2009
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Moving beyond A.M.’s Uncle Tupelo-oriented country-rock, Wilco’s double-length BEING THERE explored the sonic vistas of the Stones and Big Star. SUMMERTEETH takes things a step further. A loose, inspired masterwork of rootsy power-pop in the grand mid-’70s tradition, it’s the greatest album Alex Chilton never made. With perfect pop melodies and a knack for throwing things askew via left-field sonic elements, this is as far from the country as Wilco could be.
Jeff Tweedy’s ragged-but-right voice is the essence of rock & roll – the travails detailed in the lyrics seem undeniably his own. Though his days of paying homage to Acuff-Rose seem long gone, Tweedy and his compatriots still sound engagingly organic on SUMMERTEETH. Even if they’re closer to Badfinger after a few beers than to the post-Tupelo alt-country of Tweedy’s former partner and Son Volt leader Jay Farrar, Wilco are still treading the same path they started years ago, obviously headed in the right direction.
Tracklisting
1. Can’t Stand It
2. She’s A Jar
3. A Shot In The Arm
4. We’re Just Friends
5. I’m Always In Love
6. Nothing’severgonnastandinmyway (Again)
7. Pieholden Suite
8. How To Fight Loneliness
9. Via Chicago
10. Elt
11. My Darling
12. When You Wake Up Feeling Old
13. Summer Teeth
14. In A Future Age
15. 23 Seconds Of Silence
16. Candyfloss (Hidden Track)
17. A Shot In The Arm (Hidden Track)
Professional Reviews
Spin (4/99, p.160) – 7 (out of 10) – “…built from pieces found rusting by the roadside of the Americana Dream, seemingly at random….Tweedy’s best songs are sweet as ever….”
Entertainment Weekly (3/12/99, p.70) – “…TEETH is packed with poignant mid-tempo ballads that would’ve seemed right at home on a top 10 list in 1975. These days, though, pronouncing them merely transcendent will have to suffice.” – Rating: A
Q (1/00, p.86) – Included in Q Magazine’s “50 Best Albums of 1999.”
Q (4/99, p.107) – 4 Stars (out of 5) – “…Wilco’s chiming bells, echoey piano, feedbacking guitar, mellotrons, handclaps, wafting strings, lounging horns, masteruflly directed harmonies and psychedelic swirls shoe-horned into three-minute symphonies…”
CMJ (1/10/00, p.3) – “…propels Jeff Tweedy & Co. out of rootsw rock canon and into the classic pop milieu, smartly investigating rock’n'roll’s past…to elegantly invigorate its future. A complex, beautifully bedraggled masterpiece.”
Mojo (Publisher) (3/99, p.87) – “Another winner from Wilco….Exuberant, uplifting and elegant all at once, SUMMER TEETH sounds like the perfect soundtrack for the coming spring.”
NME (Magazine) (4/3/99, p.41) – “Perhaps the most cheerful record about dreaming of killing your girlfriend ever made…”
Billy Bragg and Wilco – Mermaid Avenue
Posted by Aaron on September 16th, 2009
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MERMAID AVENUE is a collection of previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics exhumed from the Woody Guthrie Archives and set to music by Billy Bragg and Wilco at the invitation of Guthrie’s daughter Nora.
Woody Guthrie’s gift to the world of music cannot be overstated. His songwriting helped to define folk music as we know it, as an instrument not only of musical creation, but of social change. Among those troubadours who carry on his tradition, England’s Billy Bragg stands proud, for his musical talent and his social awareness alike. In 1995, Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, approached Bragg to set to music some of the hundreds of songs that the legend had left unfinished. The result, MERMAID AVENUE, recorded by Bragg with Chicago band Wilco, is equal parts tribute and collaboration.
Joined by guest stars such as Natalie Merchant, slide guitarist Corey Harris, and violinist Eliza Carthy, Bragg more than does justice to the Guthrie legacy. From the rollicking opener, “Walt Whitman’s Niece” to dreamy double-tracking of “She Came Along To Me,” Bragg’s gift for matching melody and lyric highlights the universality of Guthrie’s music. Merchant’s fragile vocal work on “Birds And Ships” is a thing of sublime beauty, while Jeff Tweedy’s plaintive, rough timbre lends a particularly heart-rending quality to such tracks as “At My Window Sad And Lonely” and “Hoodoo Voodoo.”
MERMAID AVENUE was nominated for a 1999 Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
Tracklisting
1. Walt Whitman’s Niece
2. California Stars
3. Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key
4. Birds And Ships
5. Hoodoo Voodoo
6. She Came Along To Me
7. At My Window Sad And Lonely
8. Ingrid Bergman
9. Christ For President
10. I Guess I Planted
11. One By One
12. Eisler On The Go
13. Hesitating Beauty
14. Another Man’s Done Gone
15. Unwelcome Guest
Professional Reviews
Rolling Stone (5/13/99, p.65) – Included in Rolling Stone’s “Essential Recordings of the 90’s.”
Spin (1/99, p.91) – Ranked #8 on Spin’s list of “Top 20 Albums of ‘98.”
Spin (9/98, p.184) – 8 (out of 10) – “…The combination feels nostalgic and contemporary at once, like a good rabble-rousing speech–or a snatch of Americana suddenly recalled years after you thought it’d passed forever from memory.”
Entertainment Weekly (9/4/98, p.84) – “…Bragg and the otherwise callow Wilco make the many moods of Woody spring to life with boozy, woozy roughhouse folk-rock. It may feel like school, but at least the classroom’s rollicking.” – Rating: B+
CMJ (1/11/99, p.3) – “…The varied arrangements uncover Guthrie’s knack for evoking many moods with simple words, making for one of the year’s most memorable and inspired albums…”
