Send "Wilco " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Maybe the most challenging thing about Wilco's sixth and seventh LPs-- into the formalist, featherweight Sky Blue Sky and retrospective-in-repose of Wilco (The Album)-- is just how unchallenging they were. These records seemed at times curiously unambitious, coming as they did from one of the most forward-thinking American bands of the last decade and change. Wilco made their early reputation on their creative restlessness, their ongoing identity crisis, but since 2004's A Ghost Is Born-- still, by some distance, their most difficult work-- their music's seemed something of a retreat from their early-decade boundary-shoving. Wilco's great strength lies not just in Jeff Tweedy's world-weary inscrutability, but the ways he and the band matched those stark, sometimes startling sentiments to expectation-defying deconstructions of Americana. The best thing about The Whole Love, Wilco's adventurous, elliptical eighth LP, is the ease with which they've recaptured some of that old unpredictability: From Being There through A Ghost Is Born, the band's best work has always perched itself upon the edge of traditionalism and experimentation, and The Whole Love is the first of their albums in years not to shy away from such risks.As soon as opener "Art of Almost" whirrs to a start, you'll know something has changed. A glitchy motorik groove crashes into swarming strings before giving way to a slippery Tweedy melody; then it's elegant bass ooze and keyboard creep, over which Nels Cline drapes a searing kosmiche capper. Fraught and foreboding, the song is easily the most daring thing they've put to tape since A Ghost Is Born, a interstellar spin on Wilco (The Album)'s highlight "Bull Black Nova". It seems at first as much statement as song: The self-produced Whole Love is the first LP the band laid down entirely in their practice loft, and the brash, voluminous "Almost" feels like six musicians bottling themselves off from the world and pushing each other towards their breaking points. Though nothing else on Whole Love quite matches the exploratory zeal of "Almost", The Whole Love's littered with enough alluringly off-balance arrangements and instrumental left-turns-- Cline's screaming guitar interludes on "Born Alone", the gurgling keyboard underneath the otherwise old-timey "Capitol City", countless rhythmic exchanges between drummer Glenn Kotche and bassist John Stirratt-- to lend the record much of its precipice-teetering feel....full text |
| Spin |
| Twelve years ago, Jeff Tweedy sang, "I dreamt about killing you again last night, and it felt all right to me." Now it's, "You won't set the kids on fire / Oh, but I might." Ideally, he's speaking to the same person. Whoever has been dismissing Wilco as "dad rock" must have pretty complicated relationships with their fathers. Maybe there was a sense, with 2007's postaddiction comedown Sky Blue Sky and 2009's self-consciously cheeky Wilco (The Album), that these guys were settling into middle age with a sigh and a wink. Or maybe the fact that they'd learned to do more than one thing well somehow suggested MOR pandering. In any event, The Whole Love feels more of a piece with 1999's Summerteeth, the caustic pop opus on which Tweedy sped away from alt-country (or y'allternative, No Depression, whatever) in a car far sleeker (and blacker) than the one Hank Williams supposedly died in. Amiably skronky, seven-minute kitchen-sink opener "Art of Almost" aside, there is a concerted effort to mothball the experimental tangents of recent years in favor of laconic twang, organ-driven garage pop, and tempered balladry. This is not to say there aren't moments of dissonance -- "I kill my memories with a cheap disease," goes the psych-lite lament "Sunloathe" -- but now Tweedy's showing off his journal, not his record collection. Dad's never cooler than when he's not trying to be....full text |
| Guardian |
| Jeff Tweedy's Chicago band have made a mockery of their initial pigeonholing as alt.country. On their eighth album, the typically unpredictable primary influences seem to be Nick Lowe's spiky new wave and the multitracked Beatles of Abbey Road. Then again, the single I Might could be Tom Petty guesting with Spoon. Produced so inventively that it still often feels avant garde, The Whole Love unifies Wilco's leftfield and pop sensibilities. The album rollercoasts from speaker-melting guitar solos (Art of Almost) to contemplative comedowns (Sunloathe, Black Moon) to recorded bells and a town crier (Capitol City). They have ideas to burn, but the best moment here is the simplest: the sublime One Sunday Morning, based around a folk guitar motif of such beauty it never outstays its welcome during 12 epic minutes....full text |
Wilco lyrics Music videoclips
