Untitled Document
The backlash has landed:
Wilco, the little indie band that could, isn’t getting a free pass
from the press anymore. Sky Blue Sky, the Chicago outfit’s sixth album, isn’t being
panned, exactly, but the response has been lukewarm. Where once the critics
cited Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Radiohead, now they invoke Jackson Browne, the
Eagles, and — oof! — the Grateful Dead. Why, sounds the anxious
refrain, is Wilco going backward? Did Jeff Tweedy’s stint in rehab
make him go all soft and jammy? What happened to the avant-leaning,
static-celebrating, Krautrock-quoting Midwest abstractionists of yore?
The simple answer is that Wilco was never really that
avant-anything. Beneath the migrainous buzz, fridge-magnet profundities,
and cred-boosting Jim O’Rourke-isms of Yankee
Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born was a plain old
rock band, one that fulfilled the standard rockdude desiderata: shiny
hooks, stick-to-your-ribs riffage, and sing-along choruses. The dad-rock
vibe so disdained by the indiescenti was never absent from the Wilco
formula; it was just lurking under a fashionable layer of drone. After all,
there’s a reason that Wilco sells more records than Glenn Branca. It’s telling, I think, that my heretofore
Wilco-ambivalent friend Steve describes Sky
Blue Sky as the first great album that Wilco
has ever made. Steve is one of those old-school geezers who subscribe to
the quaint theory that people with recording contracts should know how to
play their instruments. Unmoved is he by the art-school cogitations of
self-styled saboteurs; he likes the new Wilco record because it sounds like
the honest effort of a bunch of guys who are all playing at the same time
in the same room, guys with decent record collections who want to make
music that sounds good. As Robert Frost said of Edwin Arlington Robinson,
Wilco is “content with the old-fashioned way to be new.”
This is not to say, however, that Sky Blue Sky is nothing more than
the mellow-to-a-fault ’70s-steeped pastiche that its detractors are
saying it is. Granted, its blithe guitars, shuffling rhythms, and
house-hubby preoccupations create a certain Laurel Canyon-ish feel, and
classic-rock allusions abound — a little Blood on the Tracks in “You
Are My Face,” some Abbey Road in “Hate It Here,” a flagrant “Dear
Prudence” lift at the end of “Walken.” Although strings
swoop in periodically, the album relies heavily on guitar, piano, and
vintage organ, with hotshot percussionist Glenn Kotche relegated to
click-track duties for long stretches. The newness comes through in the
songs’ arrangements, the way a drowsy country/folk jam suddenly
erupts into a proggy cadenza, blossoms into a dazzling coda of three-way
counterpoint, mutates into a whole new song. Recent addition Nels Cline,
who’s not only the best guitarist Wilco has ever had but also one of
the finest guitarists alive, is incapable of playing a merely decorative
solo; his scintillant leads and velvety textures don’t so much
embellish the songs as transform them. Another big change is in Tweedy’s lyrics, which
are much less studiously poetic than on recent efforts. In fact, in the
opening cut the prosaic veers dangerously close to the vapid: “Maybe
you still love me, maybe you don’t/Either you will, or you
won’t.” Occasionally, as on the whatever-dude anthem
“What Light,” Tweedy wallows in a kind of woolly solipsism:
“If you feel like singin’ a song, and you want other people to
sing along/Just sing what you feel, don’t let anyone say it’s
wrong.” But hokeyness is a hazard of honesty, and there’s
something brave in his almost wholesale rejection of the cryptic. He sounds
as if he’s relieved to shrug off the ill-fitting bard mantle, as if
he’s content to let the sun shine on his own bare skin.
Contact René Spencer Saller at rssaller@core.com.
This article appears in May 17-23, 2007.
