Wilco - A Ghost Is Born

Sat 17th Jul, 2004 in Music Reviews

Wilco may just yet prove to be the most resilient of all the late nineties alterna-acts; those that ‘almost made it’. Because, ever since Jeff Tweedy and Jim O’Rourke locked eyes upon each other across a smoky mixing desk, the love affair has gone stranger and deeper. If they almost coulda been contenders based on the pop songs on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, then Tweedy has taken a look at the devil (in the eyes) and decided to turn somewhere to the left.

A Ghost Is Born is much more of a traditional rock record than its predecessor, but only because the amps are want to crackle and buzz when the guitars grind on. There’s surely nothing rockin’ in most of the actual songwriting. It’s lazy to praise or blame O’Rourke – one of underground/post-rock’s main players – for the detour the band has seemingly taken since Summer Teeth. Evidence could just as easily be dug up from the I Am Trying To Break Your Heart doco that surfaced a year or two ago. Whilst mythologising the stupidity of Warner Records in dropping the band and then letting one if it’s umbrella labels resign the band, the second tier drama was far more telling. Long time sidekick, Jay Bennett began locking horns with Tweedy over the direction of the songs. Tweedy told him to fuck right off, basically; it seems Bennett could see nothing wrong with giving the audience what they wanted and expected. Tweedy – over a handful of albums into his career – was obviously sick of verse-chorus-verse. Enter O’Rourke to produce (and then join the ranks). Exit Bennett to play in cover bands. Or so we assume.

A Ghost Is Born extends the Singer As Tortured Artist Complex by a good many miles. Everything about the album screams “critic’s wet dream”. The enigmatic title, the layered artwork (as you unwrap the packaging, the egg is smashed until all you see upon taking the disc from the tray is an empty bird nest), the pop songs cut up in between long winding noise-fests.The title itself is taken from the song Theologians, the final line of which has Tweedy declaring he is a cherry ghost (is this some kind of coke pun?) The music shifts and swells within most of the songs. For instance, the opening song finishes and then has a three minute musical coda. Another has about ten minutes of ambience that gives way to a dreaded post-rock instrumental. The album closes, after this, with a simple short song.

There is almost too much to discuss, which is a fair indication that A Ghost Is Born is not just another rock album. But a rock record it is. Where Yankee Hotel Foxtrot left me cold, I could give a damn about its fate despite the doco (which I perversely loved, go figure), A Ghost Is Born makes me think of what Neil Young was up to in the mid-seventies. Zuma-esque guitars ring right through this album; the strings bleed at the edges, and the edges are usually a few minutes longer than the regular listener’s attention span. I’m A Wheel even updates the template by sounding like The Replacements did at their best, and in the scope of the album it could be read as some kind of bribe toward sitting through the fifteen minute cold shower that is Less Than You Think. It’s almost as if Wilco are saying, we DO know what we are doing, just trust us. Even if it is getting hard to; we will be one of the few to last the test of time.