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WILCO (THE ALBUM)
Wilco
The opening number of Wilco's new disc, "Wilco (the Album)," is "Wilco (the Song)," a perky little infomercial of a track touting the restorative powers of Wilco (the band). "Are times getting tough? Are the roads you travel rough?" asks frontman Jeff Tweedy. "Wilco will love you, baby."
It qualifies as a novelty song, if only on a technicality -- Wilco has never been funny before. It's also the only truly novel track on the spectacular, familiar "Wilco (the Album)," which breaks with the band's long history of sonic adventurism. The album seems to be inspired mostly by Wilco's back catalogue.
Historically, Wilco's output can be divided into noisy (like the titanic "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," whose secondary architect, guitarist Jay Bennett, died recently of a prescription drug overdose, and the cacophonous follow-up "A Ghost Is Born") and not noisy (everything else). The band's new disc draws heavily from the latter -- it's a skywritten love letter to the gentler, dreamier corners of the Wilco canon.
The album's few experimental passages are buried at the ends of deceptively simple songs; both the mild "One Wing" and the fidgety murder ballad "Bull Black Nova" end in flights of extended instrumental weirdness. But the closer the band hews to traditional three-minute, verse-chorus song structures, the more comfortable it seems. For a band as fantastically restless as Wilco, this may be the greatest novelty of all.
-- Allison Stewart
DOWNLOAD THESE: "Deeper Down," "You and I," "Country Disappeared"
ELECTRIC DIRT
Levon Helm
It might be heretical to say so, but Levon Helm's second album with producer Larry Campbell eclipses anything that any member or aggregation of The Band has done since the original edition of that group called it quits more than three decades ago. Consisting almost entirely of vintage roots music covers, the record is as inspired as his old band's 1973 rock-and-soul tribute, "Moondog Matinee."
