music
There is something in the band Wilco that just begs an argument. It helps that its music derives from tension: melody versus noise, simple country versus free jazz, order versus chaos. On Saturday night, Wilco ripped through 27 songs and three encores on the last night of their stateside tour (frontman Jeff Tweedy confirmed from the stage that festivals don’t count, so there’s one less argument).
Wherever the band goes, some kind of controversy follows, from the head-to-head battle with Son Volt on Wilco’s first record, to the battle with Time Warner over Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to its newest critical accusation, the band’s decline into "Dad Rock." So let’s continue the kerfuffle. Here are four arguments about Wilco’s October 20 performance at the Pavilion.
 All "Dad Rock" and Volkswagens? Wilco proved anything but during a 27-song set that rewarded the patience and enthusiasm of fans at the Charlottesville Pavilion. |
Everything before the first encore is warm-up
This is, of course, a nearly absurd argument, especially when you consider the range of the 18 songs that constituted Wilco’s set proper. But, to a large degree, it’s true. Saturday night’s show opened with "Sunken Treasure," where band frontman and musical center Jeff Tweedy sang "Music is my savior" and promptly followed the line up with "I was maimed by rock ‘n’ roll."
It’s a disparate universe that Wilco creates, and forming it takes time. Working through 12 years of music in a set isn’t all that hard if you tend to play from basically the same model, which Wilco doesn’t, so a walk through the band’s past bobs and weaves. The first hour of Wilco sometimes feels like learning to speak a new language.
From the scattershot rhythms of "I am Trying to Break Your Heart" to the fuzzy shuffle of "Handshake Drugs," Wilco is a band on the move, shuttling between straight-forwardness and building layers of sound only to take them apart again. At the risk of blowing up this argument, one of the night’s most impressive moments came eight songs in. Easing into the rising-then-descending notes of "Impossible Germany," their best song from the latest record, guitarist Nels Cline managed to squeeze notes in uncomfortable-yet-pleasing spaces between beats in his solos. The sweetness of this tension, along with the tension between the sound of one of Wilco’s more musically accessible songs and Tweedy’s opaque lyrics, is what makes Wilco great.
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And here’s the meat of this argument: That tension is more starkly and fully on display in Wilco’s three encores. There’s just no way around it. Even the mellower Tweedy of Saturday night’s Pavilion, when screaming "…for nothing" on the heels of "I’d like to thank you all…" for nearly a minute, creates the anxious build-up and cathartic release that fuel the band’s moments that are closest to sublime.
And, sure, maybe it wasn’t a full minute. That’s the point. It felt like 10. That’s why Wilco is at its best in the last 45-minutes of shows, as they proved in songs like "Outtasite (Outta Mind) and "Spiders (Kidsmoke)." The tension, thanks to an hour and a half of build-up, is exquisite.
It also helps that they seem to save their most rocking songs for last, too.
Nels Cline is the rock ‘n’ roll Frankenstein’s monster
Aside from his physique and head, which you have to agree reminds one of ol’ Boris, Cline, who handles the majority of leads and solos, is the almost-perfect musical equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. Just as the animated corpse, pieced together from disparate parts, showed a tenderness when confronted with softness, so does Cline when the song calls for it.
And just as the monster gently plays with a small girl, Cline melts runs and riffs into the melody of "Impossible Germany," smooths over the shuffle of "Walken" while playing a lap slide guitar and stuffs solo notes into small pockets of time until they feel like they’re about to burst. But once incited by Glenn Kotche’s drums, Cline goes mad, lurching and jerking his guitar toward his amp, trampling through songs like "A Shot in the Arm" with furious abandon. The girl is down the well.
Cline’s switch from gentle melody to madness came at surprising moments, but each time the snap into fury felt exactly right moments into it. Cline provided much of the wall of noise that Tweedy played against, walking through a sonic apocalypse each time bent over, loping along, bouncing at the knees as Wilco’s music crashed around him. And there was Tweedy in a nutshell Saturday night, shambling through the sweet musical chaos he’s created.
Wilco isn’t quite "Dad Rock" (yet)
Tweedy took what can only be construed as a shot at some recent critics after the band’s full-force run through "War on War." During the previous song, "Hummingbird," he brought up a small girl who helped him round out the last chorus before the two danced joyfully at center stage as Wilco yet again assembled all the disparate parts of the song at its conclusion. Afterwards, Tweedy threw an off-handed remark at the crowd, saying how nice it was to see children at the show. "All of our fans are getting old and dying," he said, smirk firmly in place.
In May, when Sky Blue Sky was released, mainstream critics praised its maturity. But there were grumblings from the critical sideline that Wilco had drifted into something dubbed "Dad Rock." Online critics lamented the aggression that, they claimed, the band had lost. From the seven songs the band played from "Sky Blue Sky" Saturday, it’s easy to see where those critics get their fodder. But the band’s performance of those seven songs, including "You are my Face," "Shake it Off" and "Side with Seeds" should stop any "Dad Rock" accusations right in their tracks.
With each album Wilco releases, the period of repeated listening that the new songs demand grows. This is music you must sit with. But seeing the band piece together each song live is an experience that fasttracks the waiting period. Aside from the listening experience, watching Wilco as they seamlessly take a song like "Sky Blue Sky" from a jangle to a foot-stomping screech then back, you discover just how much sonic territory the band is able to cover, seemingly without effort.
If Wilco has lost some straightforward aggression from songs like "Misunderstood" and "Outtasite," that energy has simply been translated into side-to-side movement in tone and subtlety. Tweedy also answered any "Dad Rock" critics in the band’s three encores, charging through A.M. favorite "Casino Queen" and ending the show with "Spiders (Kidsmoke)," a song that wobbles from a drone until you find it screaming in your face.
Wilco is no longer solely a vehicle for Tweedy’s vision
Sure, there was the sixth song into Wilco’s set, "Just that Simple" from A.M., where bassist John Stirratt switched instruments with Tweedy and sang. And there was Tweedy once again, behind the bass, where he began in Uncle Tupelo, gently bouncing along as Stirratt strummed and sang. But that’s not new.
What was new was Cline’s role, serving as the hinge to nearly every song, driving the band’s sound forward with his aggression (see above argument) and tempering that by stretching out melodies in "Muzzle of Bees" and "Walken." And sure, it’s still Tweedy’s band, but Saturday night held the feeling that the songs served two masters, and that Cline was obviously one of those two, and that Wilco’s music stretches and soars and is better because of it.
Even after all of the guitar fireworks on "Muzzle" and "Shake it Off" and "I Got You (At the End of the Century)," Cline’s ownership of the music became most apparent at the end of the set when he stopped jerking and kicking while bouncing notes every which way. When the band slid into "Walken" from Sky Blue Sky, Cline sat down with a slide guitar on his lap and drew out every ounce of energy from the song.
To his left, Tweedy sang a song about a song. And Cline’s sound, tempered just for the moment by the soft edges of the slide, doubled in on itself, went in and came back out. And for those minutes, just before the stage lights went bright and Clines choked the first notes from the raucous "I’m the man who loves you," Wilco was harmonious.
