When you’re back in your neighbourhood, the cigarettes taste so good, but you’re so misunderstood, you’re so misunderstood…
Short on long term goals, there’s a party that you ought to go to, if you still love rock’n’roll, if you still love rock’n’roll
Jeff Tweedy 1996
I’m not sure where to begin. If you’ve followed my blog for its duration or you know me personally, you’ll be aware of my love and admiration for Wilco. It’s a love that’s endured for almost thirty years since hearing Misunderstood on an Uncut magazine cover CD. It probably totally clicked with the follow-up LP, Summerteeth which coincided with me seeing them for the first time.
Since then I’m well into double figures of gigs, either Wilco (the Band), Jeff Tweedy or even Nels Cline in one of his jazz incarnations. I’ve been lucky enough to see them play in Sweden, Germany and France. I’m conscious that I can be borderline evangelical in trying to get people into the band.
Why do I enjoy them? If I try and distill it down it’s a question of balance – the balance between order and chaos, melody and discord, warmth and chills. All sorts of things. Their albums come along in spurts – a few years of silence and then a couple land in quick succession. We’re in that cycle at the moment – 2022 brought Cruel Country which they are effectively still touring. This month, we get Cousin, which was recorded in the middle of the gigs for the previous album. That’s the advantage of having their Loft studio in Chicago. When the muse hits, they can just drop by their own band cave.
Cousin is being touted as an art pop album (whatever the hell that may be). I think that it is going to be one of those records that has people reverting to the slightly lazy but truthful tag of the band being America’s Radiohead. They’re both unique but let’s face it – there is worse insults if you take it the wrong way.
Having seen Wilco at their only UK show of 2022 at the Black Deer Festival (the one before Nels Cline was sidelined with Covid), there are some noticeable but subtle differences a year later. The Cruel Country material which featured heavily in 2022 is still well represented. At Moseley in lovely surburban Birmingham, they start with I Am My Mother and Cruel Country, perhaps a nod to the roots of that particular folk festival. They’re gentle run into the common themes for both the London and Birmingham gigs – guitar battles and a welcome look back to Ghost Is Born.
If we start with the latter, it was released in 2004 just as Jeff Tweedy’s painkiller addictions were becoming unendurable. Produced by Jim O’Rourke, the album had an edginess that they probably haven’t come close to until 2015’s spontaneous Star Wars. Ghost Is Born wasn’t unapproachable – it featured the gorgeous Hummingbird, which flutters as lightly as its winged namesake and the ironically triumphal Late Greats. We got both songs on both nights I went along to. What Ghost Is Born also had was guitar interplay that was subsequently built upon when Nels Cline and Pat Sansone joined the band not long afterwards.
We got plenty of the album at both gigs. They opened in London with the reticent Hell is Chrome and closed with a relentless version of Spiders (Kidsmoke), it’s motorik backbeat pulled along at the end by some joyous crowd participation.
Birmingham and London featured the other noticeable drift towards a welcome fluidity between the band’s three guitarists. We still got Impossible Germany, which continues to generate shock and awe. But Cruel Country’s Bird Without a Tail was pivotal in both shows, with Pat Sansome showcasing the sort of interrelationship with his fellow players that brings to mind Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd in Television, an oft quoted inspiration for Nels Cline.
The songs didn’t need to be stretched out to highlight this symbiosis. Both shows spotlighted Side With The Seeds and Handshake Drugs where the band moved effortlessly from gentle beauty to harmonic bombardment whilst still maintaining both songs structure and melodicism. Side With The Seeds was possibly the nexus of the whole shebang, the point when all of the band including bassist Jon Stirratt, drummer Glenn Kotche and keyboard player Mikael Jorgensen came together as one. It feels as good as the Band’s Last Waltz, such is all of the musician’s grip of their own and each other’s roles.
This all bodes well for Cousin. The lead single Evicted is now part of the set, the cascading guitar hook sitting alongside the Paisley melody. Cousin is produced by Cate Le Bon, and I’m looking forward to hear what a Welsh female producer can bring to a new Wilco record.
A nice finale to the Moseley show was Billy Bragg (or “Uncle Billy” as Jeff called him) joining them for a closing California Stars. They’d worked together in 1997 on the Woody Guthrie Mermaid Avenue project and appeared to have not parted on the best of terms. Time is a healer and it was lovely to see the warm embraces between Bragg, Tweedy and bassist Jon Stirratt as we walked back into the clear warm September night.
When I started this blog, I contacted a Facebook friend who was an established blogger for some advice. He said “write about your passions, the world doesn’t need another critic.”
The friend was Mal Wright. Mal sadly passed away unexpectedly in August. I literally wouldn’t be writing this, if not for him and this post is dedicated to his memory.
You can read his work at Loosehandlebars here. It is Mal’s passionate encyclopaedic legacy and a fine one at that.
BlackCountryRock 