Posts tagged wilco
“So does Yankee Hotel Foxtrot justify the controversy, delay and buzz? Everyone, I think, already knows that the answer is yes; all I can offer is “me too” and reiterate. And after half a year living with a bootleg copy, the music remains revelatory. Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative, noisy and somehow serene, Wilco’s aging new album is simply a masterpiece; it is equally magnificent in headphones, cars and parties. And as anyone who’s seen the mixed-bag crowd at Wilco shows knows, it will find a home in the collections of hippies, frat boys, acid-eating prep schoolers, and the record store apparatchiks of the indiocracy. No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us.”
Brent Sirota, getting it right on Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in Pitchfork upon its release. The record came out 10 years ago today. (via Kiehl)
The band makes the American Association of Retired Persons’ list of 2011’s Top 10 Albums for Grown-Ups: “This album strikes the perfect balance of experimentalism (Wilco sometimes goes too far in this department) and easy charm that make Wilco one of the best American bands we’ve had since — well — The Band,” say the AARPists. In what passes for a compliment down at the home, they go on to call The Whole Love “truly listenable.” Which is true, in the sense that it is absolutely possible to listen to The Whole Love.
Congrats to Wilco for making a list that also includes Paul Simon, Barbra Streisand and Tony Bennett.
Our condolences to Feist.
(earlier)
My new piece for TwentyFourBit looks at what rock critics can’t bring themselves to say about Wilco:
“The fact is that Wilco has now released three consecutive albums about healing, peace, and gratitude, with lyrics that wouldn’t look out of place as cover lines on Oprah’s magazine. (According to Entertainment Weekly, Tweedy wanted to call the new one Get Well Soon, Everybody, which if nothing else encapsulates the record’s themes.) This surging contentment is tricky territory for a rock critic to navigate — you would not begrudge Tweedy his happiness, after all — and so The Whole Love has become that rare rock record to be reviewed as if it were a long instrumental.”
It’s part of something new I’m trying out at TwentyFourBit: a monthly piece that tries to say something interesting about the last month in music. It strikes me that most music content is either curated daily — hourly even, tweet by tweet — or at the end of the year, when everyone discusses the varying degrees to which we all liked the exact same albums. Daily curation, in particular, seems to me to be a losing game for the amateur Tumblogger — nearly all of us are just reblogging Pitchfork and Stereogum, who are in turn reblogging each other, the functional effect of which is that a “stream this album” link posted on Crumbler now produces a marginal value rapidly approaching zero. (I’d note here that TwentyFourBit is one of my favorite music sites precisely because Peter is so determined to go his own way, carving out a range of interests for his site that is willfully different from others in the space.) In any case, I believe there’s value in attempting to curate from a middle distance — after the smoke of the day-to-day has cleared, but before so long passes that one month’s records are overtaken by the next.
For this first installment, I chose to write primarily about Wilco — how the release of The Whole Love in September was reviewed, and about the curious gaps in its critical reception. From there I touch briefly on the break-up of R.E.M., and then include a handful of links to summarize the month: the anniversary of Nevermind, a great Chuck Klosterman piece about Noel Gallagher, and so on. I end with links to some of my favorite albums from the month, which can now all be freely sampled on various music services. If the column is choosy enough in what it highlights, I hope people it will drive people to music and criticism that they might have otherwise skipped over.
If anything, this first edition might have been too choosy. While I would never try to write a comprehensive “month in music” feature — it would contain 400 links, and few would be inspired to click on any of them — I do want to make sure it at least represents an impressionistic summary of the past 30 days. What I don’t know now, and what I’d love to get your advice on, is how to write something that doesn’t just feel like a critical column with some links tacked on to the end. Should we try to draw connections between the month’s big albums, even if they might be tenuous? Should I write shorter blurbs about a larger number of items? In any case, I hope to keep it flexible: no month in music is quite like the one before it. In any case, I look forward to your thoughts.
“The first time we played the Sasquatch festival [in 2005]. We went on after Arcade Fire, who were just becoming huge at the time. And they are so anthemic. And they’re climbing on the scaffolding and they’re out in the audience beating drums. It was berserk. It was like having your ass handed to you by, like, Cirque du Soleil.”
Jeff Tweedy, on Wilco’s worst show, in the Wall Street Journal.
“Luckily there’s nothing really dangerous about making a bad song and putting it out into the world. It’s not going to kill anybody, and you’re certainly in good company: more people have made bad songs than good songs, and probably a lot of good people have made more bad songs than great songs.”
Jeff Tweedy, describing his not-quite-Steve-Jobsian approach to quality control, in the Montreal Gazette.
Jeff Tweedy Covers Black Eyed Peas
“This has been very challenging: I really overestimated myself or underestimated the Black Eyed Peas,” Jeff Tweedy joked tonight at the Hideout in Chicago before hilarious off-the-cuff (and borderline musically masochistic) covers of “I Gotta Feeling,” “Rock That Body,” and “My Humps.” Thankfully, the Wilco frontman injected plenty of his trademark stage banter, making the whole experiment worthwhile to will.i.am detractors and fans of his spoken word take on “Single Ladies” alike.
“It’s… really not my skill set,” he concedes in the video above. “But I’ll give it a shot if you guys don’t expect it to be good. Right off the bat, I’m just telling you, it’s gonna be bad. It’s going to be really bad.” Coming from the guy in front of this cut and this cut off that new record debuted over the weekend, I’ll give it a shot nonetheless.
This is not only the most conflicted reblog in the history of Crumbler — it is the most conflicted reblog possible on Crumbler, as it features one of my two favorite artists on earth performing the songs of my least favorite artist on earth. The only comparable situation I can think of is Thom Yorke covering the songs of Lenny Kravitz — but Thom wouldn’t, because he doesn’t have Jeff Tweedy’s sense of humor. Well worth a watch.
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JEFF TWEEDY VON WILCO on the cover of (German) Rolling Stone.
The setlist is pleasantly heavy on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Summerteeth. (via)
Scott Hutchinson: “There is the way he plays guitar, ever understated and measured, yet with a dynamite stick of bluegrass runs and Neil Young solos stuffed up his arm, should it be called for. There’s his voice that, though limited in range, is able to conjure decades of American music and decades of his own life in one line. It’s a voice that tends towards the melancholy and often speaks of abject misery (something I am particularly drawn to) without ever sounding bleak.”
