Wilco | The Whole Love
by Alissa Ordabai
Staff Writer —
If pastiche is your trade, then you are set for life, as success of Wilco’s latest album proves so convincingly. Apart from finding new ways of mining the legacy of the late 60s and the early 70s, the band is also learning how to garnish small-scale songwriting with big-scale retro-contempo-vibes. Their special gift for making a modest musical idea go a long way is flourishing too: the opener’s repetitions of the melancholy mini-hook nearly (or should we say “almost”?) justify dedicating one half of the track to milking it and the other half – to running away from it into a free-form jam.
But “Art of Almost” is a deceptive start to the record where the rest of songwriting seems to deliberately highlight the gap between now and the era the band is tapping, where actual songs were nothing short of phenomenal. But then again, perhaps the simplified imitations of the early Kinks, the Beach Boys, and early 70s Pink Floyd are more than just nostalgia-driven tributes to a great epoch. After all, to engage in this sort of revivalism in earnest you’d have to take your melodies and hooks a bit more seriously – something that Wilco don’t do.
This makes one wonder if it’s really that simple with Wilco and if their records are really just visions of giants of the past consumed and regurgitated by everyone today. For all we know, the band’s real aim could be to reassure a certain type of listener that fandom can be a creative pursuit in itself, and that self-analysis through the prism of other people’s music can bring artistically valid results. Otherwise, it’s unclear what else could explain Wilco’s continuing emphasis on pastiche, their carefully dosed make-believe infantilism and their self-irony of a college brainiac masquerading as an underachiever.
Genre: Alternative Rock
Track Listing:
1. Art of Almost
2. I Might
3. Sunloathe
4. Dawned on Me
5. Black Moon
6. Born Alone
7. Open Mind
8. Capitol City
9. Standing O
10. Rising Red Lung
11. Whole Love
12. One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)
Label: dBpm
Online: http://wilcoworld.net
Hardrock Haven rating: 4/10