Moving Out
I've done a few things I'm proud of with Blogger, but it's time to move on to better things. My new website, which focuses more on journalism than anything I did with the Omnibus, is called Raw Creative Society and you can find it here: http://racreativesoc.wordpress.com/
I hope to find you guys there.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Wilco Discography Review Pt. 6
Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch; 2007)
I don’t like Sky Blue Sky. It’s too tame, sounds too polished and the song writing takes two steps backwards for everything that they did right. And they did do a few things right here, namely the opening track Either Way, but after Either Way’s perfect hooks and besides Impossible Germany’s nice jam, Sky Blue Sky is easier forgotten, and better off, to be honest. Although A Ghost Is Born was relatively tame as well, it was still an ambitious, courageous album. Sky Blue Sky just feels like an album made by a band that forgot its fans for a few recording sessions. It feels like an album that an album taking the lazy way out would make. There are a few admirable tracks, namely the two mentioned above and Hate It Here, but you’ll find you’re trying to convince yourself that it’s all really not as bad as it seems, that after a few times it’ll get better. It does, but there are more engaging things to listen to in the meantime. Depending on what you're looking for in Wilco - last eras country songsmiths or exciting, experimental Yankee Hotel Foxtrotters - you might favour or hate this album. To me, it belongs in the background, and it might be the same for you. Deal with that or skip this entirely.
Unfortunately, this will be the last entry in this retrospective, due to other interests being pursued.
I don’t like Sky Blue Sky. It’s too tame, sounds too polished and the song writing takes two steps backwards for everything that they did right. And they did do a few things right here, namely the opening track Either Way, but after Either Way’s perfect hooks and besides Impossible Germany’s nice jam, Sky Blue Sky is easier forgotten, and better off, to be honest. Although A Ghost Is Born was relatively tame as well, it was still an ambitious, courageous album. Sky Blue Sky just feels like an album made by a band that forgot its fans for a few recording sessions. It feels like an album that an album taking the lazy way out would make. There are a few admirable tracks, namely the two mentioned above and Hate It Here, but you’ll find you’re trying to convince yourself that it’s all really not as bad as it seems, that after a few times it’ll get better. It does, but there are more engaging things to listen to in the meantime. Depending on what you're looking for in Wilco - last eras country songsmiths or exciting, experimental Yankee Hotel Foxtrotters - you might favour or hate this album. To me, it belongs in the background, and it might be the same for you. Deal with that or skip this entirely.Unfortunately, this will be the last entry in this retrospective, due to other interests being pursued.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Wilco Discography Review Pt. 5
A Ghost Is Born [Nonesuch; 2004]
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the black sheep of Wilco’s discography. There’s a clear thematic progression from A.M to Summerteeth; that is, you feel Tweedy grow as his song writing matures. Yankee Hotel stands still, doesn’t feel like a growth in lyrics as much as it does in music. And then came A Ghost Is Born, probably Wilco’s most depressing album and Tweedy’s most frightening incarnation. One of the first things you’ll notice about the album is that two of the songs, the second and penultimate songs, are both over 10 minutes long. Wilco have never composed a song that long, and for it to happen more than once is, if not interesting, then a bit worrisome. The fact becomes more affecting when the first song, At Least That’s What You Said starts playing. The song starts off very quiet, so quiet in fact that you can barely hear Tweedy, who sounds like he’s giving up on singing altogether. Will the two 10 minute songs be as dull as this? You think, until the song picks up with a long garage jam that would have never found a place in Yankee Hotel’s eccentric production, Summerteeth’s psychedelia, and A.M’s perfect alt-country. It would have made sense in Being There, but even then it would have been a stretch. As soon as At Least That’s What You Said picks up, you know that A Ghost Is Born is, once again, nothing like what came before. Wilco are good at doing that.
A Ghost Is Born does something exceptionally interesting and, ultimately (if you have the patience) rewarding: It is the sequel to all Wilco releases thus far. It is the culmination of every idea and every character that had been created by that point. In A Ghost Is Born, Tweedy marries the overwhelming flaws he’s been hinting at up to that point with the violence and malevolence he’d been brewing since Summerteeth, but also with the good guy he’d been subtly adopting since his early days. His flaws are best exemplified in At Least That’s What You Said, where Tweedy comes to love the relationship he’s part of despite the black eye he sports from his love, as if the girl from She’s A Jar (from Summerteeth) finally hit back; In Handshake Drugs, where in the end he surrenders to his significant other, telling her that all he wants to be is what she wants him to be, so “exactly what do you want me to be?” And in Wishful Thinking, where he thanks his lucky stars that “you’re not me.” His flaws also seem to feed his evil, exemplified in Hell Is Chrome where Hell is, to him, a place where he belongs, a paradise better than Earth, and where the devil doesn’t force him to do anything, instead asking him to “come with me.” Strangely, Tweedy also sings about things that kind of make him the good guy, as in Hummgbird and Wishful Thinking, but don’t let those two songs convince you of anything, for Tweedy is once again a bastard in Less Than You Think. As for the similarities to Yankee Hotel, Jim O’Rourke returns to produce this one as well, but the album doesn’t sound like Yankee Hotel. There’s no static (except for the last 10 minutes of Less Than You Think) and no Heavy Metal Drummers, but perhaps that’s best.
A Ghost Is Born is more cohesive, and makes more sense than anything that came before. It really draws an atmosphere, making you feel like you’re trapped inside the egg on the album’s cover, a prison from which you escape only to find nothing of value outside of it. It will take a lot of patience to get through this album if you’re expecting the sequel to Yankee Hotel or even the spirit of Summerteeth, but you may find it well worth it. They band has never really written anything as affecting, or as haunting. Don’t be surprised if it becomes your favourite of all of them.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the black sheep of Wilco’s discography. There’s a clear thematic progression from A.M to Summerteeth; that is, you feel Tweedy grow as his song writing matures. Yankee Hotel stands still, doesn’t feel like a growth in lyrics as much as it does in music. And then came A Ghost Is Born, probably Wilco’s most depressing album and Tweedy’s most frightening incarnation. One of the first things you’ll notice about the album is that two of the songs, the second and penultimate songs, are both over 10 minutes long. Wilco have never composed a song that long, and for it to happen more than once is, if not interesting, then a bit worrisome. The fact becomes more affecting when the first song, At Least That’s What You Said starts playing. The song starts off very quiet, so quiet in fact that you can barely hear Tweedy, who sounds like he’s giving up on singing altogether. Will the two 10 minute songs be as dull as this? You think, until the song picks up with a long garage jam that would have never found a place in Yankee Hotel’s eccentric production, Summerteeth’s psychedelia, and A.M’s perfect alt-country. It would have made sense in Being There, but even then it would have been a stretch. As soon as At Least That’s What You Said picks up, you know that A Ghost Is Born is, once again, nothing like what came before. Wilco are good at doing that.A Ghost Is Born does something exceptionally interesting and, ultimately (if you have the patience) rewarding: It is the sequel to all Wilco releases thus far. It is the culmination of every idea and every character that had been created by that point. In A Ghost Is Born, Tweedy marries the overwhelming flaws he’s been hinting at up to that point with the violence and malevolence he’d been brewing since Summerteeth, but also with the good guy he’d been subtly adopting since his early days. His flaws are best exemplified in At Least That’s What You Said, where Tweedy comes to love the relationship he’s part of despite the black eye he sports from his love, as if the girl from She’s A Jar (from Summerteeth) finally hit back; In Handshake Drugs, where in the end he surrenders to his significant other, telling her that all he wants to be is what she wants him to be, so “exactly what do you want me to be?” And in Wishful Thinking, where he thanks his lucky stars that “you’re not me.” His flaws also seem to feed his evil, exemplified in Hell Is Chrome where Hell is, to him, a place where he belongs, a paradise better than Earth, and where the devil doesn’t force him to do anything, instead asking him to “come with me.” Strangely, Tweedy also sings about things that kind of make him the good guy, as in Hummgbird and Wishful Thinking, but don’t let those two songs convince you of anything, for Tweedy is once again a bastard in Less Than You Think. As for the similarities to Yankee Hotel, Jim O’Rourke returns to produce this one as well, but the album doesn’t sound like Yankee Hotel. There’s no static (except for the last 10 minutes of Less Than You Think) and no Heavy Metal Drummers, but perhaps that’s best.
A Ghost Is Born is more cohesive, and makes more sense than anything that came before. It really draws an atmosphere, making you feel like you’re trapped inside the egg on the album’s cover, a prison from which you escape only to find nothing of value outside of it. It will take a lot of patience to get through this album if you’re expecting the sequel to Yankee Hotel or even the spirit of Summerteeth, but you may find it well worth it. They band has never really written anything as affecting, or as haunting. Don’t be surprised if it becomes your favourite of all of them.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Wilco Discography Review Pt. 4
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Nonesuch; 2002)
At the end of the 90s, soon after Summerteeth, something strange happened to Wilco, a train of circumstances that create a story that alone propels an album to classic status. It’s a case of “the lead singer has a vision so the rest of the band better comply or **** off,” a-la My Bloody Valentine in Loveless albeit My Bloody Valentine are still the same band going in as they were coming out. But the comparisons still apply. Just like Loveless, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot took about two years between its creation and its release; there were money issues, illnesses (migraines for Tweedy and insomnia for Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine) and the end result was an album that explored new sonic landscapes.
This is where the story gets good: thinking that the album had no “pop appeal,” Wilco’s label for the past three albums, Reprise, refused to release it. So they took their demos and went to Reprise’s hotter, smarter little sister Nonesuch Records, and the album gets released in 2002 to both critical and popular acclaim, becoming Wilco’s highest selling album at the time. I’m not sure who said it, but I once heard someone say that Tweedy was the first individual to successfully mix Folk/Country with a laptop. But don’t fear, people – this isn’t the second coming of Cotton Eyed Joe. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is instead a masterpiece of song structure and progression, easily the band’s defining moment and pinnacle. The most amazing thing is that nothing on Yankee Hotel sounds like anything that came before it, not even Summerteeth. The songs are so dense that even the more straightforward tracks like Kamera and Pot Kettle Black would have been out of place in anything that came before, and to be honest, anything that came after. Thank Jim O’Rourke, who once co-produced Stereolab’s fantastic “Emperor Tomato Ketchup.”
Most people criticise Yankee Hotel for its predominantly low-key tracks, making the album boring or uninteresting. It honestly boggles my mind, but I think I understand what happened. Most new listeners trying to get into Wilco are taught that the band is a mix of alternative, country, and sometimes psychedelia. When “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” comes on, most of these people don’t know what’s happening, and the confusion only builds up in the next 6 minutes. It also happened to people who listened to Summerteeth or A.M shortly before jumping into Yankee Hotel. When they don’t hear “Can’t Stand It” or “I Must Be High” right away, they are likewise confused. It doesn’t help that the lyrics make no real sense, and just when you think you have the album pinned down, Kamera comes on and ****s up the entire system again. So, for the first three tracks, two of which are over five minutes, the listener doesn’t know what to believe. It’s just too much of a mind****. So, mix low-key songs with questionable production and wtf lyrics and you’ve got the first few minutes of Yankee Hotel. This isn’t alt country! Then there are the more patient listeners who get the album right away, or who thrive in being tossed from one idea to the next – who get that there’s more to the album than they’ve been led to believe. And there is.
Tweedy is no longer singing about the same people and emotions with the same immediacy as Wilco’s preceding releases. He’s singing about them under a veil of static and interference, as if his mind was being affected by the electronic distortions that accompany each track.
I wholeheartedly believe that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a classic. I just know that generations from now people will appreciate it much more than it is now. From its production and release story, to its song hooks and progression, and to its minimalist album cover, everything about the album spells out modern classic. We just don’t all get it yet.
So, yes, I would call this their OK Computer; their most successful album, where the band perfect its sound and hasn’t since been able to top the achievement. I would also call it their Sgt. Pepper’s LHCB for its experimentation. From this point on the band will sound more cohesive but less interesting, like the Beatles in Abbey Road.
At the end of the 90s, soon after Summerteeth, something strange happened to Wilco, a train of circumstances that create a story that alone propels an album to classic status. It’s a case of “the lead singer has a vision so the rest of the band better comply or **** off,” a-la My Bloody Valentine in Loveless albeit My Bloody Valentine are still the same band going in as they were coming out. But the comparisons still apply. Just like Loveless, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot took about two years between its creation and its release; there were money issues, illnesses (migraines for Tweedy and insomnia for Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine) and the end result was an album that explored new sonic landscapes.This is where the story gets good: thinking that the album had no “pop appeal,” Wilco’s label for the past three albums, Reprise, refused to release it. So they took their demos and went to Reprise’s hotter, smarter little sister Nonesuch Records, and the album gets released in 2002 to both critical and popular acclaim, becoming Wilco’s highest selling album at the time. I’m not sure who said it, but I once heard someone say that Tweedy was the first individual to successfully mix Folk/Country with a laptop. But don’t fear, people – this isn’t the second coming of Cotton Eyed Joe. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is instead a masterpiece of song structure and progression, easily the band’s defining moment and pinnacle. The most amazing thing is that nothing on Yankee Hotel sounds like anything that came before it, not even Summerteeth. The songs are so dense that even the more straightforward tracks like Kamera and Pot Kettle Black would have been out of place in anything that came before, and to be honest, anything that came after. Thank Jim O’Rourke, who once co-produced Stereolab’s fantastic “Emperor Tomato Ketchup.”
Most people criticise Yankee Hotel for its predominantly low-key tracks, making the album boring or uninteresting. It honestly boggles my mind, but I think I understand what happened. Most new listeners trying to get into Wilco are taught that the band is a mix of alternative, country, and sometimes psychedelia. When “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” comes on, most of these people don’t know what’s happening, and the confusion only builds up in the next 6 minutes. It also happened to people who listened to Summerteeth or A.M shortly before jumping into Yankee Hotel. When they don’t hear “Can’t Stand It” or “I Must Be High” right away, they are likewise confused. It doesn’t help that the lyrics make no real sense, and just when you think you have the album pinned down, Kamera comes on and ****s up the entire system again. So, for the first three tracks, two of which are over five minutes, the listener doesn’t know what to believe. It’s just too much of a mind****. So, mix low-key songs with questionable production and wtf lyrics and you’ve got the first few minutes of Yankee Hotel. This isn’t alt country! Then there are the more patient listeners who get the album right away, or who thrive in being tossed from one idea to the next – who get that there’s more to the album than they’ve been led to believe. And there is.
Tweedy is no longer singing about the same people and emotions with the same immediacy as Wilco’s preceding releases. He’s singing about them under a veil of static and interference, as if his mind was being affected by the electronic distortions that accompany each track.
I wholeheartedly believe that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a classic. I just know that generations from now people will appreciate it much more than it is now. From its production and release story, to its song hooks and progression, and to its minimalist album cover, everything about the album spells out modern classic. We just don’t all get it yet.
So, yes, I would call this their OK Computer; their most successful album, where the band perfect its sound and hasn’t since been able to top the achievement. I would also call it their Sgt. Pepper’s LHCB for its experimentation. From this point on the band will sound more cohesive but less interesting, like the Beatles in Abbey Road.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Wilco Discography Review Pt. 3
Summerteeth (Reprise; 1998)
Summerteeth is so sexy. The whole album is drenched in mystery, darkness, sarcasm and catharsis. This is Jeff Tweedy at his lyrical bravest. In Via Chicago, one of the album’s strongest songs, Tweedy sings, “I dreamed about killing you again last night, and it felt alright to me/ dying on the banks of Embarcadero skies, I sat and watched you bleed/ Buried you alive in a fireworks display raining down on me/ Your cold, hot blood ran away from me, to the sea.” Couple that with Tweedy’s stance on God on “Can’t Stand It” and his sadism on “She’s A Jar” and what you get is their most daring album yet. Sexy is also the album’s production, which makes Wilco sound nothing like they did on A.M three years prior. They perfected the slight psychedelia of Being There, took away anything that resembled alternative country, and really came into their own. Two posts ago I said that A.M is their most accessible album. Summerteeth definitely challenges this. Not only is each of the first seven tracks better than anything on A.M, the entire album is much more memorable.
One of the gems in the album, a song so surprising lyrically it immediately became my favourite song in the playlist, is Pieholden Suite. Whereas most of the album is kind of dark, Pieholden Suite surprises and delights by completely derailing and becoming positively nostalgic. The song starts as sad as anything else on the past three albums, but then Tweedy travels back in time to sing one perfect verse, “In the beginning we closed our eyes/ whenever we kissed we were surprised to find so much inside”, after which the song opens and builds up like a blue sky after rain. It’s a delight to listen to, but it’s often unfairly overlooked.
In continuation with the Radiohead comparison, A.M = Pablo Honey, Being There = The Bends, but Summerteeth isn’t OK Computer. If anything it’s their The Bends take two.
Although A.M is their easiest to listen to, Summerteeth is the most rewarding of the 90s releases.
Summerteeth is so sexy. The whole album is drenched in mystery, darkness, sarcasm and catharsis. This is Jeff Tweedy at his lyrical bravest. In Via Chicago, one of the album’s strongest songs, Tweedy sings, “I dreamed about killing you again last night, and it felt alright to me/ dying on the banks of Embarcadero skies, I sat and watched you bleed/ Buried you alive in a fireworks display raining down on me/ Your cold, hot blood ran away from me, to the sea.” Couple that with Tweedy’s stance on God on “Can’t Stand It” and his sadism on “She’s A Jar” and what you get is their most daring album yet. Sexy is also the album’s production, which makes Wilco sound nothing like they did on A.M three years prior. They perfected the slight psychedelia of Being There, took away anything that resembled alternative country, and really came into their own. Two posts ago I said that A.M is their most accessible album. Summerteeth definitely challenges this. Not only is each of the first seven tracks better than anything on A.M, the entire album is much more memorable.One of the gems in the album, a song so surprising lyrically it immediately became my favourite song in the playlist, is Pieholden Suite. Whereas most of the album is kind of dark, Pieholden Suite surprises and delights by completely derailing and becoming positively nostalgic. The song starts as sad as anything else on the past three albums, but then Tweedy travels back in time to sing one perfect verse, “In the beginning we closed our eyes/ whenever we kissed we were surprised to find so much inside”, after which the song opens and builds up like a blue sky after rain. It’s a delight to listen to, but it’s often unfairly overlooked.
In continuation with the Radiohead comparison, A.M = Pablo Honey, Being There = The Bends, but Summerteeth isn’t OK Computer. If anything it’s their The Bends take two.
Although A.M is their easiest to listen to, Summerteeth is the most rewarding of the 90s releases.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Wilco Discography Review Pt. 2
BEING THERE (Reprise; 1996)
Cool Fact: The title of the album is derived from the 1979 movie of the same name.
Cool Fact: Although it was packaged with two discs, Reprise sold Being There for the price of one.
Hot off the heels of their 1995 effort A.M, Wilco return, sounding more atmospheric and cryptic. Whereas A.M was straight up, flannel shirt wearing alternative country with no mystery or real ambition, Being There is a sprawling double album that, when not completely doing without their alternative country sound, sounds like a more refined version of their then signature sound. As soon as “Misunderstood” starts the listener knows that this is no part of this album is going to sound like the beloved “Casino Queen” or “I Must Be High” of the year prior.
“Far, Far Away,” is probably the first lyrical surprise. At first it sounds like something that could have belonged in A.M, until the song nears its conclusion as Tweedy explains that he will find his beloved in the dark side. Citing The Dark Side Of The Moon provides the song with an eerie vibe that hints at Tweedy’s soon to be most infamous vocal, “I dreamt about killing you again last night, and it felt alright to me” (from Summerteeth). Although there are songs like “Monday” and “Outtasite (Outta mind)” (and, really, most of Disc 1) that are musically and thematically similar to the tracks found on A.M, there are a few surprise inclusions. “Kingpin” sounds like something Beck would have conjured, and “Dreamer In My Dreams” sounds like the Beatles resurrected.
Plenty of Disc 2 also sounds more country (minus the alt) than A.M, creating a diverse, often surprising though sometimes-redundant double album. I’m going to cheat and go back and say that A.M is not their transition album, but that Being There is. There are hints of what came before and what is to come for the band musically and thematically, though they would really depart in the psychedelic Summerteeth.
If A.M was their Pablo Honey, Being There is definitely their Bends.
Cool Fact: The title of the album is derived from the 1979 movie of the same name.
Cool Fact: Although it was packaged with two discs, Reprise sold Being There for the price of one.
Hot off the heels of their 1995 effort A.M, Wilco return, sounding more atmospheric and cryptic. Whereas A.M was straight up, flannel shirt wearing alternative country with no mystery or real ambition, Being There is a sprawling double album that, when not completely doing without their alternative country sound, sounds like a more refined version of their then signature sound. As soon as “Misunderstood” starts the listener knows that this is no part of this album is going to sound like the beloved “Casino Queen” or “I Must Be High” of the year prior.“Far, Far Away,” is probably the first lyrical surprise. At first it sounds like something that could have belonged in A.M, until the song nears its conclusion as Tweedy explains that he will find his beloved in the dark side. Citing The Dark Side Of The Moon provides the song with an eerie vibe that hints at Tweedy’s soon to be most infamous vocal, “I dreamt about killing you again last night, and it felt alright to me” (from Summerteeth). Although there are songs like “Monday” and “Outtasite (Outta mind)” (and, really, most of Disc 1) that are musically and thematically similar to the tracks found on A.M, there are a few surprise inclusions. “Kingpin” sounds like something Beck would have conjured, and “Dreamer In My Dreams” sounds like the Beatles resurrected.
Plenty of Disc 2 also sounds more country (minus the alt) than A.M, creating a diverse, often surprising though sometimes-redundant double album. I’m going to cheat and go back and say that A.M is not their transition album, but that Being There is. There are hints of what came before and what is to come for the band musically and thematically, though they would really depart in the psychedelic Summerteeth.
If A.M was their Pablo Honey, Being There is definitely their Bends.
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