For a free download of Wilco's "What Light," click here!Only Wilco can make dissonance sound so gorgeous. But for their eighth studio effort, the lovely
Sky Blue Sky, frontman Jeff Tweedy boxed up the special effects that buzzed and jangled throughout the tremendous
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and
A Ghost Is Born. Instead, he’s favored “songs you can put in your pocket,” admitting that recreating so many orchestral and ornate Wilco songs live makes him nervous.
“This is the most civilized record Wilco has ever made,” Tweedy has said. This time around, Wilco tackled each tune together, rather than leaving Tweedy to flesh out songs on his own. Personal and spare,
Sky Blue Sky ambles along with brushed drums, piano-led melodies, and near-whispered lyrics that show off Tweedy’s best instrumentation—a tender voice that sounds sweetest when breaking.
Since his days sharing the stage with Jay Farrar as alt-country kingpins Uncle Tupelo, of which Wilco bassist John Stirrat was also a member, Tweedy has surrounded himself with peerless multi-instrumentalists―Glen Kotche, Nels Cline, and Pat Sansone, whose experimental and silt-stirring productions added the avant-garde edge to Wilco’s last two albums. Tweedy no doubt had to tone down his pals for
Sky Blue Sky.
Decidedly more folk than rock and roll,
Sky Blue Sky is to its predecessors what the cold morning after is to a lonesome night on the town. Sober with reflection and remorse, Tweedy’s got a romance on the skids, and he and his guitar are probing it like an open wound.
More reminiscent of the mellow melodicism of 1999’s
Summerteeth,
Sky Blue Sky swells and ebbs with each new song. The gloomy, dirgeing piano of “On and On and On” is juxtaposed with the faux optimism of “Hate It Here,” which has Tweedy pacing a profoundly empty house, washing dishes, folding laundry, busied with denial, while “You Are My Face” offers a confession of guilt, and explodes mid-song into a weeping, live-wire guitar solo. Stripped of the cryptic lyrics and walls of fuzz that made them one of the most enduring and dynamic bands today, Wilco prove that underneath all their experimentation lives a delicate and powerful song.