I will freely admit it: I hopped aboard the Wilco train after pretty much everybody and their brother had already ridden the damn thing two or three times. They’d been this kind of invisible band through much of the late nineties, at least for me — a single here and there, “Box Full of Letters” or Woody Guthrie’s “California Stars” drifting out of my radio, a nod and a smile and then they’re gone and out of mind. It took the universal acclaim for 2002’s YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT plus a good ten or eleven months before I got my head out of the sand and gave the damn thing a listen, joined the choir in proclaiming it genius and felt proud of myself for trying something new. (Cue restrained, polite golf claps. I am nothing if not at the very vanguard of johnny-come-latelys.)
So I was excited to give their new album, A GHOST IS BORN, a listen when it came out. Only someone (I refuse to name names) tried to burst my bubble by declaring that at least one review had labeled the album incoherent and drugged out, a paranoiac jam album with stuttering, extended guitar solos. “Rubbish,” I thought — “It’s the curse of high expectations, post-masterpiece.”
Well, the truth of the matter is somewhere in between, I guess.
“At Least That’s What You Said” starts off hesitantly, cautiously, like Tweedy’s just checking to see if the crowd will stop talking long enough to realize the music’s started. “I said maybe if I leave you’ll want me/to come back home/or maybe all you mean/is leave me alone/at least that’s what you said.” Not sure if this is a good fit, maybe we’ll just call it a night, all that jazz… hesitant.
“Hell is Chrome”‘s even more insubstantial — again, Tweedy’s voice is barely registering. Are we even sure there’s a band here? And then:
“Spiders (Kidsmoke)”: full-on lunacy kicks off. The maddening, repetetive up-and-down of the bass and keyboard, the jangly guitar that bleeds off into chaos. And then the YANKEE HOTEL Tweedy shows up, assured vocals, and the whole thing becomes kind of a heavy jam piece that lines right up, one on top of the other. Easy to see why someone looking for YHF Part II would dismiss this record right now. The track is lengthy and almost monotonous, and would be were it not for the moments when everyone falls back into line.
“Muzzle of Bees” starts off simply enough, acoustic guitars gently falling over each other. “Half of it’s you/half is me.” Beautiful.
“Hummingbird”: It’s… late-period Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby”-style. (Although if only Tweedy and the boys had the same unerring instinct for timeless melody that McCartney and Lennon did at that point. I’m fully aware I’ve just opened a huge can of worms among some of my acquaintances with that statement.)
“Handshake Drugs”: difficult to hear this song without the gentle lilt it had as one of the B-sides on the BRIDGE EP, released on the ‘net over Wilco’s website between YHF and GHOST. There was kind of a freewheeling bounce in it that moved along without help; this mix loses some of that, I think, by emphasizing the piano. Or maybe not. Too much rhythm section? And the tempo’s up. Still a good song, though. And where’d this echo come from at the end? Lefties from “Ashes of American Flags”, although we know that’s not the case.
“Wishful Thinking”: there was a drop between the songs, but the end of “Handshake” and the beginning of “Wishful” are of a piece. Acoustic guitar from a distance, dreamy and slow. “I got up off my hands and knees/to thank my lucky stars that you’re not me/what would we be without wishful thinking?”
“Company in My Back”: uh… it’s pretty enough, but I suspect this is another of those instances where someone looking for evidence of Tweedy’s substance abuse problems will see… something. Pretty lyrical images and then a line like “they are hissing radiator tunes” to tear you out of it. The dulcimer’s nice, though.
“I’m a Wheel”: moves. Here’s your high-energy rock closer for the show. Wonder what this would sound like, a little more unrestrained by production?
“Theologians”: not as much ROCK as “I’m a Wheel”, but the piano’s got a nice classic rock feel. I’m still not hearing anything that would definitely classify this album as a drugged-out disaster; lyrically, maybe, but then I didn’t think the language of YHF was all that coherent, so what do I know?
“Less Than You Think”: everyone gets a credit for loops, filters and synths, except for Mikael Jorgensen, who must have lost a bet or something. Sparse and haunting, actually, even through the end. Is this what the credits refer to as the “drone section” of track 11? Again, anyone looking for a reason to dismiss the album’s got one (I’m at the 7:00 mark and I’m still getting Channel X sound here. I feel like Jodie Foster in CONTACT, looking for patterns. Is that a helicopter over my house, or is that in the mix? I dunno.) Holy crap. “There’s so much less to this than you think” indeed.
“The Late Greats”: It’s a present for sitting through that last one. Thick, robust bass. Niiiiiice. A little uplifting and hopeful after the Drone — light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps? Too much pop psychology for me, but it sure feels that way to me…
And that’s that. Twelve tracks, start to finish, one of which is a bizarre-ass move (Twelve minutes of noise? Twelve? Is that arrogance — you’ll listen to anything, you cretins, and proclaim it genius — or is there some deeper meaning that you’re to take into and out of the drone? Are you gonna sit there and let it play when you’ve got GHOST playing in your car, or are you just gonna skip up to the last track?) Flawed? Yeah, probably. A masterwork? Nah. But it’s new and different in all the right places, so it gets a passing grade in my book.
Too bad there’s not really a single there; nobody’s gonna buy this thing…
