The last studio album by Wilco climaxed with 12 minutes of brain-melting noise designed specifically to simulate the migraines the band's leader, Jeff Tweedy, had been suffering from. Released in 2004, A Ghost is Born was a wildly divisive record, an indulgently difficult masterpiece full of pained dynamics, avant-garde affectations, grating rashes of guitar noise, and lyrical non-sequiturs. I loved it, but a lot of people didn't, and the people who didn't really didn't. And that's totally understandable. By his own admission, between his various illnesses, anxieties, and addictions, Jeff Tweedy has been a volatile personality in recent years - to the near destruction of his band, and, as he suggests in an interview on the hour long making-of DVD which accompanies a deluxe edition of Wilco's new album Sky Blue Sky, to the near destruction of his marriage and his family as well.
Sky Blue Sky comes across as an act of contrition, not so much to the listeners who found A Ghost is Born unlistenable, but, more specifically to his wife, his family, and the band itself. It's been ages since Tweedy has written such matter-of-fact songs, with so little affect - it's the band's "livest" sounding record since their raucous debut A.M. twelve years ago - and Wilco has never made a prettier sounding album than this. Maybe, you still love me. Maybe you don't, Tweedy sings in the opening track. I will try to understand. Tweedy may not be all apologies, but on songs like "Either Way" or "Please Be Patient With Me", he is at least supplicant both in word and musical deed. If A Ghost is Born was Wilco's Sonic Youth album, then Sky Blue Sky is their beautiful Buffalo Springfield.
More than anything, Sky Blue Sky is a collection of songs (as opposed to a sculptural conglomeration of sounds and word puzzles), and if a specter of the band's darker side hovers around in some of the album's darker nooks - in the abrupt verse-chorus dynamics of "You Are My Face", for instance, when twinkling guitar picking and spacy Pink Floyd vocal harmonies (the kind that feel monotone even though they aren't) suddenly turn into a hard-edged riff doubled by thunderous toms, or in the song's Dylanesque lyrical ellipses - the general musical vibe is pastoral and contemplative, a soundtrack for watching pretty yellow flowers grow with the sun overhead, and a just-passed summer storm still visible, the sky still steely and electric over the southern horizon, the grass still wet, and the smell of rain still in the air. The very prettiness and approachability of the record is off-putting at first - it's eerily uneventful. But then again, that seems to be the point. No more drama, as Mary J. would say.
First impressions suggest a dull, or at least, a very minor record. But the delicacy of it all, combined with Tweedy's plainly-drawn images of regular joe domesticity, and of the everyday rigors and loneliness of recovery - an entrancing interweaving of the transcendent with the mundane - becomes addictive in its own right. Something cozy to wrap yourself up in. In "Hate It Here", Tweedy talks about distracting himself from being alone by cleaning house, doing laundry, mowing the lawn. In the sparsely worded "Impossible Germany", he sings of trying to snap out of denial, to face some unfaceable problem, before the song dissolves into nearly four epic minutes of textured, layered guitar Jeff Tweedy/Nels Cline duetting - as methodical, careful, and crafted as an afternoon spent cross-stitching. And with a dollop of common man wisdom worthy of one of Ray Stevens's more sincere moments, "What Light" celebrates both the importance and the hazards of being an artist, imploring us all to get in touch with our own Inner Tweedy. Most of these songs settle into leisurely Sunday afternoon grooves - layered acoustic guitars laced with the soulful warbling of an organ, or humming mellotron - which can be a little numbing at times. But Wilco do crank out a couple of good rockers that hint at the band that Wilco used to be. "Shake It Off" has a furious determination to it, while "Walken" is positively gleeful.
In fact, one of the most striking things about Sky Blue Sky, in general, is how it seems, all at once, to be both the band's happiest and saddest record ever. There's an expansiveness in its smallness and understatement - the way that, say, an afternoon spent at home with family, weeding a garden, just taking care of the little things and taking care of yourself may be sort of inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but is, simultaneously, the most important, consequential thing in the world. Sky Blue Sky is an album full of little moments about little moments - a refreshing retreat from the consuming ambition of the records preceding it. There's an admirable courageousness in the how straightforward Tweedy's lyrics are, the unfancy-ness of the arrangements, the six-guys-in-a-room overdublessness of the playing, the effort to make a record that's, y'know, nice to listen to that's also still, y'know, honest and good - which adds up to what may be the band's most approachable and moving records to date, an album that, like a homemade quilt, seems to grow warmer and more personal the more time you spend wrapped up in it: another classic from a band that seems incapable of producing anything less.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Sky Blue Sky" by Wilco
Nonesuch Records
Released 5/15/07
Produced by Wilco
51 min.
SONGS: Either Way - You Are My Face - Impossible Germany - Sky Blue Sky - Side With the Seeds - Shake It Off - Please Be Patient With Me - Hate it Here - Leave Me Alone (Like You Found Me) - Walken - What Light - On and On and On
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 pre...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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