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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born: Should’ve been in love
Wednesday 16 June @ 11:44:41 |
 by Rob van Alstyne
Next week marks the grand arrival of Wilco's new album, A Ghost Is Born, in record stores. Like its predecessor, the critical darling Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (the album which finally saw the acclaimed Chicago group break through to moderate commercial success and make the leap to playing venues larger than First Avenue's mainroom), A Ghost Is Born has been all over the internet and readily available for at least five months prior to the album's release. So you Wilco diehards already know what I'm about to tell you—A Ghost Is Born is the first non-great album of head Wilco-ite Jeff Tweedy's career.
 It's a hard thing to admit, as I've long held Wilco in a vaunted place in my heart and record shelf (and was certainly pulling for Tweedy after the news of his recent rehab stint for addiction to painkillers). Wilco was a special band for so long in part because of its ability to simultaneously satisfy multiple listening impulses. They could be a dour art-rock band ("Misunderstood") or feel-good bar rockers ("Casino Queen"), their songs were just as likely to be lush mid-tempo pop ("Jesus, Etc.") as bristling arena-ready crunch ("Monday"). Even as their records moved away from the everything goes eclecticism of 1996's Being There and the band dropped much of its folksier instrumentation in favor of a uniformly spacier keyboard heavy aesthetic, there was still the tension between serious mood-driven pieces and more immediately palatable melodies.
The increasingly ornate arrangements the band favored largely came from the mind of multi-instrumentalist, studio wizard and frequent co-songwriter Jay Bennett (the guy unfortunately best known to latter-day era Wilco fans as the jerk with bad hair who got what was coming to him for pouting too much in Sam Jones' Wilco documentary "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart").
Regardless of Bennett and Tweedy's personal conflicts, it's an undeniable fact that Bennett was central to the group's evolution and overall sound. After he was unceremoniously ousted from the band in mid-2001 Wilco went on the road as a four-piece and acted as if his absence could possibly go unnoticed—which is tantamount to cutting both your legs off at the waist and hoping no one will notice the blood trail in your wake as you move about with your arms.
The record that the Tweedy/Bennett creative brain trust had left in its wake was brilliant enough, however, that the band largely pulled off the trick. Never mind that the band had become a largely robotic and bland live music affair, eventually replacing Bennett with a programmer named Mikael Jorgenson whose musical contribution appeared to be playing Tetris on his iPod while the rest of the band actually kept itself busy on stage. The band stayed on the road in support of YHF for nearly two full years, sparingly playing new live material and garnering critical hosannas for perfunctory live performances wherever they went in a case of "The Emperor's New Clothes"-level critical taste-making.
Now comes the first album of recorded material in Wilco’s post-Bennett era, and each listen makes it more obvious that Tweedy's tunes sorely miss the creative give and take of his Bennett collaborating days. The tension between poppier material with big guitar hooks/sweeping keyboard fills and moody folksiness has been largely eradicated—only the moodiness remains. With the exception of a third-rate stab at raw garage rock ("I'm A Wheel"), the band sticks to moody soundscapes and occasional jaunty mid-tempo-folk-pop piano-led tunes. The album is heavy on open spaces and world-weary vocals, light on memorable melodies or arrangements.
Fortunately, Jeff Tweedy is still blessed with one of the most moving voices in rock, a cigarette-stained Midwestern croak that could cut to the emotional quick even if he were reciting the phone book.
Unfortunately, he's not too far removed from that trick on A Ghost Is Born. His voice remains remarkably restrained throughout, reciting yet another batch of vaguely free associated lyrics with occasionally striking imagery ("you thought it was cute for you to kiss my purple black eye, even though I caught it from you") that never really hold together. Tweedy's voyage into the land of "challenging" (or nonsensical depending upon your feelings) lyrics was to my mind the one never-discussed weakness of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but it was a fault that was easy to ignore with the words being delivered by such a passionate singer and married to incredibly captivating arrangements.
 It will be exceedingly interesting to see if A Ghost Is Born [right] gets the same rapturous critical reception as Wilco’s prior albums.
Here in the bland and spare arrangements served up on most of the album's dozen tunes, Tweedy's voice is automatically the center of attention (this is essentially a singer/songwriter album) and his lyrics nearly always the driving force of the tunes—which makes it all the more frustrating that they frequently don't go anywhere (with a few strong exceptions, such as the stirring narrative of the spiritually lost musician in "Hummingbird" and the harrowing seemingly autobiographical "Handshake Drugs").
There are still a handful of fantastic tunes on the record—the album opening "At Least That's What You Said," "Muzzle of Bees" and "Theologians" all rank up there with some of Wilco's best material—but for every high point there's a more frustrating low. The extended masturbatory guitar freak-outs of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" seem to have been placed on the album solely as a middle finger to the listener (if Tweedy was intending it as a showcase for his guitar skills and thereby making a case for the departure of Mr. Bennett—he fails miserably). Considering that it took three years from when recording on the long delayed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot wrapped to when A Ghost Is Born saw release, the least one could expect is a set of solid tunes throughout. At least three of the tracks on the record ("Spiders (Kidsmoke)," "Wishful Thinking," and "I'm A Wheel") leave no lasting impression (at least no positive lasting impression).
Couple that with the fact that "Handshake Drugs" was already released roughly 18 months earlier on the band's limited edition More Like The Moon EP in an essentially identical version to the one that turns up on A Ghost Is Born and it looks like Tweedy's new lineup was only able to come up with nine quality songs in nearly three years of working together (no wonder multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach left the group after A Ghost Is Born's sessions finally came to a close).
 Jay Bennett [left] during his Wilco days, he recently released his second solo album, the relatively uneven Bigger Than Blue.
Compare that to the run of prolific greatness that the band experienced between a similar span of time in the ’90s (between 1996 and '99 the band released roughly 40 songs—nearly all of them top flight—spread out over two full-lengths and the collaborative Mermaid Avenue Volume 1 with Billy Bragg), and it's clear there may not be as much in the collective creative gas tank of Wilco as there once was. Hopefully new replacement Wilco’s Nels Cline and Pat Sansone can help remedy the situation—but somehow I doubt it.
A Ghost Is Born is still an exceedingly pleasant listen, a good album. What it isn't is a good Wilco album (because good Wilco albums are GREAT albums—period). Jay, Jeff, please kiss and make up … I want my favorite band back.
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