Wilco

“What you inherit from your fathers, earn again in order to possess it”, wrote Goethe in “Faust”. No one, in this early stretch of the new millennium, has shown better than Wilco how to start from the most classic American folk-rock tradition, filtered through an alt.country sensibility, and reach an innovation that's never merely cerebral, one in which electronics and noise experimentation become tools for a genuine baring of the soul.

The chance to hear them play a free concert at the Festa dell'Unità in Milan is one not to be missed. And the crowd, though probably caught off guard by how punctually the evening began, fills up almost the entire floor of the Mazdapalace after the first few songs, following every note from the American band with warm enthusiasm.

The opening, entrusted to the pearlescent piano tones of “Hell Is Chrome,” immediately leads into an intimate, enveloping dimension, where Jeff Tweedy's wounded voice instantly tears through every guard around the heart, while the band builds a solemn, majestic crescendo. The round bass of “Handshake Drugs” ushers in an equally overwhelming ride, in which the fluid solos of a guitar virtuoso of Nels Cline's caliber get swept up in the whirlwind of feedback at the close.

There's no scenic frills propping up the concert, with the lighting kept to a minimum and the six musicians on stage moving with understated restraint. Yet not for a single moment does anyone miss it, faced with music so capable of holding one's full attention.

Although Jeff Tweedy complains of a few technical hitches, the confidence with which Wilco build their layered walls of sound is utterly convincing. Amid the jagged dissonances of “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” Glenn Kotche's drumming darts about filling every space with its strikes, while “At Least That's What You Said,” greeted by the crowd with an ovation from its very first notes, stuns with its shift from a rarefied ballad into towering distortion.

And so, the pop lightheartedness of “Hummingbird” is just a graceful pause before reaching the beating heart of the evening, a “Via Chicago” whose sudden alternation of explosions and silences leaves you breathless, creating an unsettling contrast between the subdued melody chased by Tweedy's voice and the band's deflagrating climaxes, somewhere between Neil Young and Radiohead.

The lush arrangements of “War On War” and “Jesus, Etc.” lend the songs an unprecedented vitality, and Wilco even venture into improvising a scorching new rock-blues, introduced by Tweedy as a work in progress. As expected, the setlist is dominated by tracks drawn from the band's two most acclaimed works, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” and “A Ghost Is Born,” though there's also room for a couple of songs from the two chapters of “Mermaid Avenue,” in which Wilco, together with Billy Bragg, set to music some forgotten lyrics by the folksinger par excellence, Woody Guthrie.

Before the encores there's still room for a torrential version of “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” in which Wilco tinge the original's kraut-rock with a shadowy blues, building to the prolonged catharsis of the guitar chorus, with the lights turned on the crowd.

When the band returns to the stage, the mood turns more relaxed and cheerful, if inevitably less gripping, making room for the earthy rock of songs like “The Late Greats,” “I'm A Wheel” and “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” with the guitarist even indulging in a few Pete Townshend-style windmills... Then again, “rock 'n' roll is part of the cure,” as Jeff Tweedy declares before playing around with the crowd on the old “Kingpin,” inviting everyone to join him in a liberating scream.

But it's “Misunderstood” that steps in once again to remind us that what Wilco do is far more than a rock 'n' roll party — the song that first carved the divide between the two phases of the band's career, where the repetition of the closing lines, “I'd like to thank you all for nothing at all,” turns into a hammering obsession whose force leaves you stunned.

For the circle to close, all that's left is to pay one final tribute to Dylan's “invisible republic,” with a cover of “I Shall Be Realesed” in which the legendary imprint of the Band shines through. The perfect crowning of an evening at the end of which the roots of American music seem both older and newer than ever.

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