4 out of 5

Label: Reprise

Produced by: Wilco

Another band to which my response has been affected (moreso than usual) by my history with them.

I worked at Sam Goody, cool music guy James kept playing ‘Summerteeth.’  Little green me wanted James to love me, so I bought ‘Summerteeth.’  And listened to it a fucka lot, but as was the case with a lot of speedballed music in those days, I don’t think I was actually listening to it so much as memorizing it.  Now search for the other reviews where I’ve said something similar, because generally it applies to bands who go through some kind of massive hype exposure, which of course happened with Wilco and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

It’s possible I still had ‘Summerteeth’ in my collection at that point, along with ‘Being There,’ and ‘AM…’ the historians will have to sort that bit out.  But look: either way, I fell outta love before YHF, in part because of the critical and indie love for ‘Summerteeth,’ for sure, but also because it just wasn’t 100% my shtick.  I dig good pop and good rock, but Wilco just didn’t dig deep enough into the right areas for me – sour sweet, but not dark, which is why it made me happy when Califone – a band which does embrace the darker side of this folk puzzle – had their relative big break with ‘Roomsound,’ and maybe in the Magnet review or something, it was called the album Wilco had wanted to make with ‘Yankee.’  ‘Cause we indie crappers are churlish bastards who like to feel like our band is better than yours.  Good story.  Anyhow, you go back in Wilco’s career, and obviously they get closer to Uncle Tupelo folk rock, ‘AM’ almost indistinguishable from the band.  So god forbid you had quizzed me on any of the tracks on that disc back in the days I claimed to like Wilco; you would have broken my SmartAss Defenses and I would’ve had to retreat to Limp Bizkit records (this is how it works).

But… it’s too bad my ears weren’t warmed up to straight ahead rock in them years, because ‘Being There,’ the true tonal middle-point between the records on either side of it chronologically, is a pretty duffin’ good rock record.  I still don’t get much out of Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics, which alternate between god bless rock and roll lines and I miss a girl lines, with the occasional poetic accessibly sad missive tossed in to keep the aging hipsters happy that they can still feel dissatisfied with their lives, but the group, in this incarnation, absolutely had a penchant for creating head-bobbing, toe-tapping singles.  The album is by no means boring at two discs – pretty perfect sequencing and a pretty even 40 minuteish runtime per disc keeps things moving along and varied – however, the need for two discs of music seems more like “we had too many songs” than a need for all 19 tracks to be together.  Some of the sentiments are fairly interchangeable, and the rocker / slow song / folk song split could have been easily condensed down to one, strong hour-long package.  Outside of the typical folk-rock touch, there are some ear-grabbing experimentations that probably pointed the way to where the band would go on following releases: the slow, chaotic build of the passionate opener ‘Misunderstood’ (a track with more aggression than most of their output, and a style I wish could’ve been explored more); the funk of ‘Kingpin.’  And then there are those brief moments where Tweedy and crew do push beyond a rock celebration, such as with the harmonic and delightfully sad ‘Why would you wanna live,’ that, again, included in a more concise package, would probably have more punch.

Disc 1 is definitely choice, a bit more bold in its sound, with disc 2 leaning more heavily on the folk influence and thus sounding a bit more typical.  But overall?  Yes, this is a damn fun album, with nary a boring moment or a complete stinker of a track.  It’s still not quite exactly my bag, but I’d no longer wrinkle my nose up at you if it’s the bag for you.  (Or at least if I do, it’s not because of your Wilco record collection.)