Published on Jun 22, 2004
On “Radio Cure,” the third track from Wilco’s celebrated
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, bandleader Jeff Tweedy sings “There is
something wrong with me / My mind is filled with silvery stars.”
Which is about as fine a summary of this album as I could ever come
up with — it’s a disc infused with a particularly brilliant and
beautiful brand of madness.
In more ways than one, the sound of
YHF — ambient noise, strange textures and atmospherics
weaving in and out of songs that shimmer with surreal poetry and
compelling melodies — is the sound of a band breaking free. From
its roots as the co-inheritor of the No Depression/alt-country
mantle along with fellow Uncle Tupelo refugees Son Volt, Wilco has
evolved over the course of 10 years and four albums into
singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy’s vehicle for interstellar musical
exploration.
YHF‘s ripples, squonks and bizarre segues seem almost
calculated to generate the eventual result — the album’s rejection
by Warner, the band’s release from their contract and repurchasing
of the masters, and the album’s eventual release on indie label
Nonesuch.
So what was all the fuss about? Take just one moment for example
— the outlandish transition as the final section of acoustic
campfire sing-along “War On War” devolves into an electro-shock
chaos crescendo that dips, feedback-and-out, straight into the
Steely Dan-esque electric-piano-and-strings intro to “Jesus, etc.”
It’s dazzling, really, both because it’s so different, and because
it actually works, feeling organic rather than pretentious. It
works again and again, in fact, as song after song doesn’t end so
much as have a nervous breakdown before flowing into the next. The
overall effect is kind of like living inside a musical savant’s
60-minute spiral into insanity. Disorienting, yet compelling.
Let’s not get lost in the forest, though, because there are some
fine trees to be examined. “Kamera” finds Tweedy doing his best
Lindsey Buckingham, layering harmonies over a steady-building
acoustic-and-chunky-electric guitar rhythm. Very tasty. On “I’m The
Man Who Loves You,” the band sets the wayback machine for the roof
of Apple Records circa 1969 and a pastiche of Abbey Road-era
Beatles, complete with stabbing, raunchy guitar lines, a
careeningly sloppy “arrangement,” sweet harmony vocals and — hey,
why not — horns on the middle section. Naturally, the whole thing
train-wrecks at the end.
One of the other intangibles that helps set this album apart is
Tweedy’s unique vocal delivery. The album opener, “I Am Trying To
Break Your Heart,” begins “I am an American aquarium drinker / I
assassin down the avenue / I’m hiding out in the big city blinking
/ what was I thinking when I let go of you.” The words themselves
are bizarre enough, but is the narrator angry, mean, depressed,
sad, stoned or demented? Tweedy’s delivery is so deadpan you can’t
tell; you can only listen and get caught up in the hypnotic cadence
of his words.
One of the prettiest songs here is “Poor Places,” which starts
out with the sound of a truck backing up and lets the steady
beeping turn into the rhythmic marker the song is built around. The
surreal poetry of the lyrics carries you through five minutes of
discordant longing until the song drifts off and becomes tangled up
in an electronic hallucination that leans farther and farther into
the swirling sonic abyss as a child’s voice repeats “Yankee Hotel
Foxtrot” in a quiet monotone.
Uh, yeah.
Hidden in the flow-of-semi-consciousness poetry that makes up
the lyrics are some particularly fine nuggets; my favorites being
these two: “Picking apples for the kings and queens of things I’ve
never seen / Distance has no way of making love understandable.”
And, “You were right about the stars / Each one is a setting sun.”
It’s no reach at all to find out that Tweedy went into rehab
subsequent to this album; there was clearly something tweaking him
out in a big way as he put these songs together.
We should all be grateful, though, that the tape was rolling.
This is the best album that Pink Floyd and Jackson Browne never
made together. It’s a disc that the artist called perfectly formed,
the label called unreleasably uncommercial, and the critics — once
they got ahold of it — called stunningly brilliant. They were all
right.