“Clearly, they’re waiting for a party to start,” said David Letterman before introducing Wilco for a recent performance on “The Late Show.” He gestured at the table pictured on the cover of the band’s seventh studio release, Wilco (The Album).
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Abracadabra! The new Wilco record is a smaller bag of tricks, but still has its fair share of magic. |
“Everything’s ready—they’ve got the chairs, they’ve got the cake, they’ve got the camel.” But no band in sight! Then, a magic trick: Letterman spins the vinyl sleeve in his hands and, poof, the band appears. Spin it once more and the members of Wilco vanish faster than you can say “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.”
Not to say that modern rock’s masters of illusion aren’t fully present on Wilco (The Album): The Chicago sextet’s lineup has been solid both on the road and in the studio since 2005, and the latest batch of songs stands strongly alongside 2007’s Sky Blue Sky. Instead, it’s the mind-melting illusion that’s missing. Used to be that Wilco would saw an album in half and then reassemble it (2000’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) or open its audiences’ jaws to feed ’em flaming, six-stringed swords (2004’s A Ghost Is Born; “Impossible Germany”). This time, rather than disappear a skyscraper, Wilco (The Album) is card tricks—simple sleight of hand.
And the sleight is partly literal. Nearly five years after the Lurch-like Nels Cline joined the band, Wilco’s bold song constructions seem built around Cline’s dexterous fingers, rather than the cheshire cat production work of Jim O’Rourke, or the angst-to-art translation of the old tensions between singer Jeff Tweedy and late guitarist Jay Bennett. Cline is still at his best live—buy 2005’s Kicking Television for proof—but here he pulls aces from invisible spaces on tracks like “Deeper Down” and Tweedy’s manic murder tale, “Bull Black Nova.”
Tweedy remains the central magician of Wilco (although drummer Glenn Kotche deserves credit for mesmerizing the audience, as any sexy assistant should). But where Tweedy’s lyrics and melodies were once chained, padlocked, dropped into water and dared to escape, Wilco circa 2009 is direct. Instead of staring down into dark pools waiting for songs like “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” or “Sunken Treasure” to erupt, I find myself staring down tracks like “You Never Know” and lead single “You and I” and wondering whether I missed the trick.
Of course, every magic act has its faulty catch or hidden key that unlocks the whole deal. In “One Wing,” Cline and Kotche build from fluttery fills to flight, and bassist John Stirrat joins Tweedy on one of the frontman’s finer, more direct choruses: “One wing will never ever fly/ Neither yours nor mine/ I fear we can only say goodbye.” And in “Solitaire,” Tweedy—once as “cold as gasoline,” alone with his deck of cards—delivers the very thing masked on albums like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: a song as pleasant as it is uncomplicated.
The trick, it turns out, isn’t in a dove or deck of cards. The greatest trick on Wilco (The Album)? That a band responsible for so much sonic greatness could be merely, magically good.
