Wilco - The Whole Love

Mon 10th Oct, 2011 in Music Reviews

So here we are. Another Wilco album, and the question is not “is it any good?”, but rather, “is it as good as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot / A Ghost Is Born / insert favourite Wilco album here?”, and of course, “what are they doing this time?”

Wilco are fond of dismantling the component pieces of Americana, curious as to how far they can go before the parts cease to resemble the whole. However, the irreducible heart of their work remains Jeff Tweedy’s songs, and his voice. There is weight to nigh-on everything Tweedy says (except for the gibberish); his darker moments allude to a far greater darkness overcome, and his even his more joyous moments retain the shadows of the past. But this is not Edgar Allen Poe, it is a commercially-oriented rock album in 2011, so the great victory is that Tweedy is able to work such a depth of feeling into such sumptuous, digestible music. Although the casual listener’s ear may be stretched by the likes of Art of Almost and One Sunday Morning, The Whole Love’s seven- and twelve-minute bookends.

They’re a band noted, and celebrated, for their adventurousness, but when they play it straight, they can be just as devastating. Wilco never give the sense of pushing boundaries for the sake of it. They are in tune with and indebted to the tradition that they represent and they mine the sounds of America’s recent musical history in order to communicate the bewildering emotional and cultural landscape of America’s present. However, when a point can be conveyed simply, it is. The gentle waltz of Open Mind hinges on Tweedy’s romantic plea, a dream “of our two hearts entwined”.

The whole point here is that the experiments are a bonus. Wilco do what they do frighteningly well, and their detours, into Can-inspired krautrock ( Art of Almost ), into trad-jazz ( Capitol City ), into garage rock ( Standing O ), never fail to sound like Wilco. They’re not dicking around, they just happen to have a musical vocabulary that puts most bands to shame. They use it to creep around the listener’s expectations, so that by the time One Sunday Morning creeps into view, the last thing the listener expects is a plaintive acoustic ballad. Thus disarmed, the listener is fully exposed to the heartbreaking, redemptive power of said song, probably the best on the album, and remains in a thrall-like state for most, if not all, of its twelve minutes. And that is the genius of Wilco.

Undoubtedly one of the best albums of the year (again), The Whole Love is an eloquent report on loneliness, confusion and nostalgia in contemporary America.