WILCO - A Ghost Is Born

THE ENDLESS AUTUMN OF MELANCHOLY

by Cristian Degano

That Jeff Tweedy was a thoroughbred songwriter had been clear for a long time, ever since he stepped up as the leader of Uncle Tupelo, a band of enormous importance to Nineties indie rock, even if short-lived. Having left that chapter behind, here he is back in action with the project that still sees him on stage today: Wilco. "A Ghost Is Born", the latest offspring of the lineage, is the fifth chapter of a path that's brief in chronological terms (just 9 years) but enormously long on an artistic level, one that has stood out for Tweedy's extraordinary ability to blend the most diverse musical traditions with striking personality: pop, country (alt-country was the label, too narrow, used to describe his music), glitch electronica, classic rock. All of it perfectly summed up in the 2002 masterpiece: "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", a work that made ordered chaos and destructuring - always contained within solid pop melodies - its own creed, and was enriched by the production of Jim O'Rourke, a true additional member of the band (his presence on this new record too is proof of that) and the architect of an already extraordinary solo career.

"A Ghost Is Born" marks another turning point (as, basically, every one of its predecessors did): chiaroscuro atmospheres built from sudden flashes hurled into the fog, bursts of clarity thrown into a languid narcosis of the senses, sudden pop surges alongside anguished guitar laments, words as fragile as crystal sung in a broken, moved voice, itself on the verge of shattering under the weight of meanings that are very, perhaps too, deep and sorrowful.

The overall sound of the record feels strangely altered, as if it had passed through the filter of an endless autumn made of melancholy and unease: the sun still shines, but you see it through Tweedy's restless spirit, worn down by recent painful personal experiences and therefore less charged with the delightful irony that had marked his previous work. Telling is the long noise-laden journey tacked onto the end of "Less Than You Think", 12 minutes of "microcosmic" music in which Can are projected among the wreckage of the human soul, following a touching lullaby sung with a broken tenderness, almost cracked by tears. There's no shortage of flashes of brilliant Beatlesque pop ("Hummingbird" and the caustic "Theologians" above all), but the overall mood is damn bluesy, in substance if not in form.

"Hell Is Chrome", a genuine personal testimony from Tweedy, carries the imagination down deserted roads crossed by the moved flight of birds (an overwhelming guitar solo, broken by pain, that scrapes the walls of the firmament), while the opening "At Least That's What You Said" undergoes a sudden electrification full of rage and damnably cursed overexcitement.

The record's cohesion is chipped slightly by a couple of weaker episodes than the rest (the pastoral "Muzzle Of Bees" and the sugary "Whishful Thinking"), but the overall standing of the work remains remarkable, bolstered by remarkably sincere, dazzling lyrics and a claustrophobic yet overflowing sonic fabric — a colorful impressionistic canvas sketching inner landscapes drunk on sadness and nostalgia. Shadows and light, then, giving substance to a work that is never dull and always gripping (just think of the blazing "I'm A Wheel"), the epigraph of an artistic vitality that didn't go up in the haze of the psychotropic-drug dependency that nearly swallowed Jeff Tweedy whole — but rather, an inspired offspring of it, standing proudly alongside its very worthy predecessors.

***

A FLESH-AND-BLOOD GHOST

by Gabriele Benzing

It is a ghost made of flesh and bone, the one whose birth Wilco announce.

The rebirth of a fragmented self, in search of its own original identity.

A shell that cracks open and ventures out to meet the world.

At the heart of the long-awaited return of the former "godfathers" of the alt.country scene lies nothing more than this: a man in search of his own true face, in his relationship with reality and with the connections that life is woven from.

After the troubled gestation of "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", acclaimed by critics after being rejected (with brilliant foresight…) by the band's former label, "A Ghost Is Born" seemed destined to be the American band's album of certainties, despite the departure of multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach at the end of the album's recording sessions.

And yet, just when everything seemed ready for the record's release, came the news of the sudden cancellation of all the promotional commitments the band had already scheduled: Jeff Tweedy, Wilco's voice and soul, had to begin treatment to get clean from his dependency on painkillers, which he had been using to fight the migraines and panic attacks that had been haunting him.

But Tweedy, with the band once again a step from the abyss, finally managed to break free from the grip that had tightened around his spirit: and so, this record becomes at once a confession of fragility and a point of balance.

That subtle sense of lightness that had made "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" unforgettable gives way, on "A Ghost Is Born", to a far more concrete, tangible sound, the result of an approach that chose to favor the band's dynamic expression over studio experimentation, while still continuing down the road of that definitive break from easy "roots" comforts begun back with "Summerteeth".

A record made of fuller, less immediate songs, demanding attentive listening to let its substance emerge: while to bring the songs of "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", born within studio walls, onto the stage Wilco had essentially had to relearn them from scratch, this time Jeff Tweedy wanted that learning phase to come first, starting from simple improvisations, learning to build them in a live setting, and only at the end of that process moving on to recording.

So, just an echo of guitar and a breath of piano are enough to sustain the sigh of Tweedy's voice in the opening of "At Least That's What You Said", dense with melancholy longing. It's the sound of a distant sob, bitter as a bond that has lost its meaning.

"When I sat down on the bed next to you/ you started to cry/ I said maybe if I leave you'll want me/ to come back home/ or maybe all you mean/ is leave me alone".

And it's the piercing pain that resigned voice was trying to hide within itself that surfaces when, after two minutes, a cutting electric guitar enters the scene, borrowed from Neil Young, anticipating the arrival of the rhythm section and turning a rarefied ballad into a jagged crescendo of distortion, somewhere between disorienting and diffuse.

The piano turns bouncy and briefly deceives us into a soul-drenched lightheartedness, but it's only the impression of an instant, the prologue to the appearance of a mysteriously beguiling demon that, rather than inspiring fear, gently invites us to follow it. It's "Hell Is Chrome", and once again that stinging guitar, tinged with cosmic Floydian suggestions, steps in to draw new contours.

A metronomic, krautrock-inflected drumming then introduces "Spiders (Kidsmoke)", letting sharp shards of guitar intertwine with the obsessive rhythm in their dissonances, forming a dreamlike counterpoint to Tweedy's voice. And when the guitars open up into that chorus no one dared hope for anymore, pure rock 'n' roll breaks free from the strict robotic geometry of this mutant track.

In "Muzzle Of Bees" and "Company In My Back", the circularity of Jim O'Rourke's acoustic guitar (once again guardian spirit and additional band member) grants a pacifying pause, seemingly drawn from certain folds of his "Eureka" and "Insignificance", before promptly making way for the singer-songwriter pop of "Hummingbird", as Beatlesque as it might have been in the hands of Elvis Costello: a sugary string arrangement would have been enough to make it annoyingly saccharine, whereas here it's only a viola scented with countryside air that softens its hummingbird flutter.

And so we finally arrive at the true heart of the album, with the irresistible bassline of "Handshake Drugs" acting as glue for a rock sound full of electric reverb and reflections that are only seemingly light. Because liberation from "handshake drugs" begins when you're no longer a slave to what others demand of you: "Oh it's ok for you to say what you want from me/ I believe that's the only way for me to be/ exactly what you want me to be". The first step toward reclaiming one's own human gaze thus lies in overcoming that veil of indifference in which the world seems to want to wrap our selves, to the point of making us forget even who we really are: "Where I'm going you cannot come/ no one's gonna take my life from me".

Only then is it possible to understand what Tweedy sings in "Theologians", once again faking a playful smile: "Theologians don't know nothing/ about my soul/ I'm an ocean". The heart's insatiable thirst cannot be contained within a scheme or a theory. The cages built around our desires are not the last word: a ghost has been born, something that cannot be reduced to the measure of the world. A ghost willing to follow its truest aspirations all the way through, wherever they may lead. After all, "what would we be without wishful thinking?". This, in the end, is the decisive question, summed up in the query that echoes through "Wishful Thinking", after a carpet of hiss and improvisation blossoms into a guitar and organ wrapped in electric vibrations.

Then one can surrender without reservation to the straightforward rock of "I'm A Wheel", heir to the most classic Uncle Tupelo and Wilco and worthy of a Replacements reincarnation converted to pop. Or one can get lost in the expanses of "Less Than You Think", which starts out as a simple, aching piano ballad only to dissolve into the midst of a radioactive cloud with invisible edges, made of loops, synthesizers and improvised noise. A quarter of an hour of experimentalism that actually sounds juxtaposed and self-contained, whereas the rest of the album always manages to communicate, without ever slipping into predictability.

Then again, the secret of Jeff Tweedy, entrusted to the carefree rhythm of the closing "The Late Greats", is simple and disarming: "The best songs will never get sung". It's nothing more than an attempt to capture a fragment of that elusive, ever-escaping beauty.

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13/12/2006