Wilco (The Record Review)

I have been eagerly awaiting the upcoming late-June release of Wilco (The Album), the ninth studio release (if you count the Mermaid Avenue albums with Billy Bragg) from what I guess is my Vince Young equivalent in the rock and roll world (i.e., they can do no wrong and I will defend them until the bitter end).  So you can imagine my excitement when, in LA for a wedding over Memorial Day weekend, a friend who I was already very excited to see, walks into a bar Sunday night and hands me a usb drive with a leaked copy of the album on it.  I loaded it onto my iPhone the next morning, and have listened to pretty much nothing else ever since.  After roughly 8-9 days of listening to it approximately 50-60 times (conservative estimate), I am ready to say a few things about it.

Happy Birthday, Camel.

First of all, it is awesome.  I mean, it f’ing rocks.  Their last album, 2007’s Sky Blue Sky, has grown on me, and I now like it a lot, but it took some getting used to, and I probably only listened to it 2-3 times in the first week after I got it.  I have probably listened to Wilco (The Album) at least 5 times a day since last Monday.  I can’t get enough of it.  Not since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot came out in 2002 have I been so taken by a Wilco album, especially not this quickly. 

Second of all, the album cover is a little weird. 

It is a sonically deep record, and it shows that the band members are very comfortable with each other at this point.  From the opening track, “Wilco (The Song),” the record both echoes some of their older material as well as takes steps into new ground.  There are shades of the oft-extended-in-live-versions refrain of “NOTHING! NOTHING!” from “Misunderstood” in the repeated “Wilco, Wilco, Wilco will love you, baby” in that first track, which I imagine might also be drawn out for a few extra bars in live concerts.  I’m also a big fan of “Country Disappeared,” which might as well be the sister song to “Hate It Here” from Sky Blue Sky, both with a touch of that Rolling Stones “Beast of Burden” sound to them.  “You and I” is a sweet vocal duet between Jeff Tweedy and Leslie Feist, who you might remember from her “1, 2, 3, 4” song that was all over the iPod nano commercials back in 2007 and then promptly disappeared, but this song is a bit of a departure from most of the band’s songs, in that it actually has a positive message and doesn’t disguise futility and despair in a sweet-sounding melody.  I also really like the Elton John-esque piano undercurrent in “You Never Know,” but this is probably my least favorite song on the album.  That’s the kind of album this is.  Even my least favorite song has something in it that I really like.

All of the tracks on this record are great, but the one that I am freaking out over is “Bull Black Nova.”  This is the one track on the record that has a little of the prog-punk undertones carried over from A Ghost Is Born, which I really enjoy.  Something about this song gripped me right away, but it wasn’t until the third or fourth listen that I realized that it may or may not be written from the perspective of someone who has just committed murder in his home and then gone to dump the body somewhere.  Call me crazy, but that’s what I’m getting here.  And that is just amazing.  Not that I’m condoning it, but I’m also pretty sure Jeff Tweedy didn’t kill anyone, so we’ll give him a little artistic license here.  There is some serious desperation in his “I can’t calm down, I can’t think” line, and then, well, there’s also the “There’s blood on my clothes, there’s blood on the sofa” to consider.  And whatever he did, he keeps telling us that “It can’t be undone, it can’t be undone.”  That’s pretty heavy. 

Anyway, if you have the chance to listen to Wilco (The Album), do it and do it soon.  If you have to wait until the album is actually released later this month, that’s ok (although it is streaming sporadically on their website).  I’m sure I’ll have a few more things to say about this album come the end of the year, because it is sure to be my top release of 2009, but by then I will have listened to it a few hundred more times, so I might have noticed a few more things worth talking about.

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I Attack With Love, Pure Bug Beauty

(Wilco, Company in My Back)

The Bar exam is over. The two topics I knew absolutely nothing about, no matter how much I studied them and practiced writing essays on, were nowhere to be seen on the test. Needless to say, I was very excited about this. Oh, I bombed (at least) one question, to be sure, but I definitely did better on that question than I would have on one of those other topics, so I’ve got that going for me. Check back on May 23 to find out how I did.

In other news, Wilco just finished their 5-night stay at the Riviera Theater in Chicago. Those Chicagoans don’t know how good they have it. I would pay one million pesos for a CD/DVD set of that gig. I have been able to find nights 4 and 5 available for download, though, so if you’re interested, you can get them here (part one and part two of night 4) and here (night 5). Night 4 was the WXRT broadcast, which is fine, because the quality is really good, but you get a little radio chatter, station identification type stuff, and they also muted out the “shit” in “Company in My Back”, which, I mean, come on. Really? But if that doesn’t bother you, then you’ll definitely enjoy it.

They’re playing tonight at the 9:30 club in D.C., which NPR is streaming on their website. I’m sure it will also be put into the archive of concerts on their website, they usually have a pretty good collection of concerts to listen to on the web.

I’ve been listening to some new music as well lately, but I haven’t absorbed it enough yet to say anything, so I’m going to reserve comment until a later date. But if you ever had the desire to make up a band name and a name for your band’s album, along with cover art for the CD, then check this out. I suppose you could just do this with some imagination and a camera, but it’s still pretty cool. My band’s name was “twenty second pulse” and the album’s name was “get to the garage.” Random, possibly a bit ridiculous, but it was a lot of fun to play with.

Got the family coming in this weekend to celebrate both Mom and Dad turning 60, which means that 80% of my readership will be in my apartment. Maybe instead of posting, I should just make snarky comments out loud?

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My Kind of Town (Chicago Is)

(Frank Sinatra, My Kind of Town)

I’ve never wanted to live in Chicago so badly in my life.

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Remember to Remember Me

(Wilco, Hummingbird)

His goal in life was to be an echo. The type of sound that floats around and then back down like a feather. But in the deep chrome canyons of the loudest Manhattans, no one could hear him. Or anything.

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