Wilco

Jeff Tweedy has nothing of the rockstar about him. A buttoned-up denim jacket, a bit rumpled, the uncertain gaze of a man who knows fate could easily have dealt him a very different hand than that of leader of one of the best bands around at the turn of the millennium, he carries himself in an almost self-effacing way. That thin voice, full yet fragile, that tousled hair. Ten years ago, when they toured the world singing Woody Guthrie songs reworked together with Billy Bragg, his Wilco were a bunch of American kids with cowboy hats on their heads and hulking folk guitars, saturating every cubic inch of air around them. Today they hold rock music firmly in their grip. They've chewed it up, taken it apart and put it back together, grafting onto it synthetic sounds, military-march rhythms, jazz, soul, prog. And it works. Terrifyingly well.

To hear them play these days, you have to travel all the way to Seville, and all things considered it's not that much of an effort. It would be harder to sit through a full set by Akron/Family, but the tight schedule of the Festival Territorios only allows the three crazy American new hippies three quarters of an hour of stage time, nothing more, so it's manageable without too much trouble. Wilco are the headliners of the penultimate day of the 2009 edition, but they won't be the last to play here at the charterhouse, a stone's throw from the Guadalquivir, tonight. After them, believe it or not, it's the turn of the resurrected Jayhawks. Mark Olson and co. will end up starting at two in the morning.

You only need to arrive at half past nine to enjoy all three sets from the front row, and that can only happen in Spain, or perhaps only in laid-back Andalusia. Around here Wilco are as popular as they deserve to be, and it's no coincidence that they rarely pass up a trip to Iberian soil at least once a year. This mini European tour, which precedes the release of their seventh studio album by about a month, is no exception: ten dates, all packed between Spain and Portugal straddling May and June. They arrive in Seville just a few days after the death of their former guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, the driving spirit of the band's breakout years. The days of "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", to be precise. Bennett and Tweedy hadn't parted on good terms, and just a few weeks before he passed away he'd filed a claim against him over unpaid royalties. An ugly story.

If good family man Mr Tweedy from Chicago doesn't have the swagger of a rock icon, his audience isn't exactly a mob of wild youngsters either. The average Wilco fan, it seems, is somewhere between thirty and forty years old, just a touch younger than the band themselves, with a calm temperament and a high attention span. No surprise there. The atmosphere is so easy-going it's almost surreal, and after all it is a surreal experience in itself to stand just a few metres from the six members of a globally renowned band simply doing their job. When they walk on there's applause and just the odd little shout; when, in the dark, they launch into the martial drive of "Wilco (the Song)", one of the gems from the new album that had already been circulating online in previous weeks, there's silence and anticipation. After the classic "Handshake Drugs", Tweedy, with blue raspberry-coloured lights flaring behind him, strikes up voice and guitar for "One Wing", another new track that until two days ago could be found in its studio edit on YouTube. The song builds slowly, fills out, and before the sweeping final rush there's room for the first taste of Nels Cline's monstrous skill. In 2007 Rolling Stone included him among the top 20 new Guitar Gods, and saying he plays like a god is perhaps the least you could grant him. A god, a monster, an alien. Take your pick.

Tweedy, for his part, lends voice to his songs and plays with a nervy, slightly frantic energy. In Uncle Tupelo he left most of the singing to Jay Farrar, his job being mainly to wrestle with the guitar. And if he didn't have Cline standing two metres from his right elbow, he'd cut a fine figure tonight too. Even so, he shows off real skill on the six-string. Anyone who'd never seen him live wouldn't have bet on it. The other monster can be glimpsed back there, with the immediately drooping, sweaty fringe of Glenn Kotche, who handles the drums as if they were an orchestra. The remaining three – co-founder John Stirratt on bass, Mikael Jorgensen on piano and keyboards, and Pat Sansone on whatever else is needed – are simply excellent musicians. The result is that live, you instantly get the first clue as to why Wilco are so good at making records. They know how to play, brilliantly. Not something to take for granted.

Then, of course, there's that extra alchemical something. The added value, the specific gravity. The elusive quality. That's where the chills come from, melting inside you as the band launches into the powerful surges of "At Least That's What You Said", "Impossible Germany" and "You Are My Face". Three stab wounds that break up the set, and you immediately realise they'll leave you bleeding right through to the end. Tweedy wraps himself in an almost mystical aura, spreads his wings and becomes part of something bigger than you. He's gripped by a kind of fever, while Kotche pounds away and Cline contorts himself, weaving his asylum-worthy solos, songs within songs, luminous tracer rounds that need no baroque flourishes nor crowd-pleasing glances.

After a while that cool customer Kotche treats himself to an ironic bit of showing off, hoisting himself upright on the drum kit, arms and sticks stretched toward Seville's starry sky, while Tweedy kicks off the southern-rock riff of "I'm The Man Who Loves You", and it all erupts into celebration. This time the solo goes to the frontman himself, who by now is loose, in the groove, and it's a thing of beauty. When the song ends, he grabs the mic and says the next one is the last, but nobody believes him. And yet, already halfway through the overflowing, pounding version of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)", it becomes clear Tweedy wasn't joking.

It's an almost rave-like finale, a full ten minutes of disorienting pursuit. Festival scheduling shows no mercy, old man Olson is probably already itching to go to bed, so these fifteen songs will just have to be enough. Then again, for nearly an hour and a half we've looked the new frontier of rock straight in the eye. We can settle for that.

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