WILCO - Kicking Television (live in Chicago)

With an impressive string of top-notch records behind them, handfuls of unforgettable songs and a constant drive for sonic experimentation, Wilco treat themselves to a double live album to celebrate their tenth anniversary, twenty-three tracks spanning two hours drawn from the shows held last May in Chicago. The title echoes the outtake of the same name from the sessions for their latest album, originally released on a mini-CD bundled with the European reissue of that record.

Those lucky enough to have seen them live know very well how well their songs suit the live dimension, thanks above all to the raw immediacy that direct performance lends to Tweedy's anguished lyrics and to the instrumental prowess of Stirrat, Kotche, Jorgensen, Cline and Sansone.

This testimony offers us a kaleidoscopic taste of sweetness, bitterness, melancholy, lightness, suffering and rage, conveyed through the band's well-known blend of blues and pop, rock'n'roll and folk, direct in transmitting strong emotions in the manner of the group's masters: Neil Young, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan. The heart, wounded by an irreparable loneliness in which we sometimes seem to vanish, finds comfort in the melodies and reverb of a guitar, a small distant chisel of organ, a fiery blaze of drums, a warm bass line.

The band's typical dialectic of acoustic-electric, melody-cacophony, shadow-light is amplified even further, embodied as it is in the tangible reality of a true, intimate sound that hits the gut before the head.

“Misunderstood” from “Being There” symbolically opens the show, almost representing the group's entire poetics, namely the tendency to bring order out of chaos, as true art has always done; we then plunge into a long journey drawing mainly from the last two albums, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” (2002) and “A Ghost Is Born” (2004): the drunken, swaggering wiggle of “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart”, the fiery gallop of “At Least That's What You Said”, the sweet lament of love in “Jesus etc.”, the epic, almost Pink Floyd-like desolation of the masterpiece “Ashes Of American Flags”, the descent into the hell of madness that is “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” – eleven minutes of pure adrenaline, as if the energy suppressed in the studio were finally unleashed in all its power, with all credit to Kotche for the force with which he pounds the skins.

In between, a series of splendid gifts from the back catalogue, including “Via Chicago” (“Summerteeth”, 1999), opened up towards infinity by a dreamy carpet of keyboards that resurfaces just as, having crossed the dark forest of perdition, one is finally heading back home.

The imperfection (the drum machine on “Heavy Metal Drummer” that only kicks in properly at the end of the track) makes the work even more authentic, just like the life that Wilco's songs try, in fragments, to describe.

The thrilling journey that is “Kicking Television” is impossible to convey in words, which are cynical and soulless next to the music it contains; the only advice one can give is to listen to it, losing yourself in its details (the ones that, in the absence of any real Essence, make up reality), in the sharp-edged tenderness born from the restless mind of Jeff Tweedy, through a long ride on a rollercoaster at the end of which you feel just a little more alive.

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30/04/2026