A lot of people came across Wilco via their big Yankee Hotel Foxtrot breakthrough and never really kept up. People like me. Those people still have this frozen impression of Wilco as a band: folky, structured, with the occasional headscratching detour into noise. But it's kind of one of those blind men and the elephant things: the more you feel around Wilco's catalog the more you see YHF as a somber outcropping on a larger, wilder continent of rock and roll adventurism.
With this and a dip back into The Whole Love (more soon) you can start to get the big picture: there's a just *good* *band* here, guys who have that knack for letting good songs and interesting ideas flow through endlessly, who make adventurousness and tunefulness coexist effortlessly. They don't balance their impulses: their impulses are in balance.
The interplay of guitars, the hypnosis, the agreeable tone, the drift of emotion and sensation, the toe-tapping, the crunchy vocal float: this is the band My Morning Jacket strives to be, and fails from over-striving. Hell, this is the band U2 strives to be, maybe Blitzen Trapper (Wild Mountain Nation fevr).
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All that shows through here on their latest (free!) album: it's inventiveness is understated, the tone agreeable but fresh. The feel is loose and jammy, but it's the opposite of a jam album: leaving you wanting more, songs tipping out in 3:00 or so before they remotely overstay. You feel like Wilco could pound out 200 more albums like this, and every one would be a pleasant surprise 4/5
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