Part of Who Are Wilco? (Disc. #2)

I don’t exactly know why, maybe it’s the cataract of honest emotion, but it seems that most musicians write their greatest works when they bear the weight of an enormous vice. Jeff Tweedy is no exception, having battled an addiction to painkillers for many years before getting clean in 2004. Although Wilco’s sixth studio LP and first post-rehab record, Sky Blue Sky, is a relatively easy listen for most, when compared to some of his other works it just falls flat.

The album starts off with a little ditty entitled “Either Way” that shows some promise, albeit highly produced promise. Then, like a runaway train hitting a truck full of watermelons… dueling guitar wank session! Now, I swear I'm not a snob and I’m not above overlooking a minor flaw in any one song, but these guitar solos seem to be, like the whale, all over the place. The main problem with the solos is that they don’t fit with the morose, despondent music that Jeff Tweedy and Wilco create. They even feel a bit forced, like Tweedy wanted to let us know that the dexterity in his fingers has returned after kicking the habit to the curb. In fact, many solos on Sky Blue Sky serve as awkward, ill conceived and plain unnecessary flourishes.

However, it’s the combination of these misplaced solos with easy listening chord progressions that has elevated Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky to an unrivaled place in the pantheon of adult contemporary music. Not a day goes by that I don’t hear Wilco emanating from the speakers of some mid-life crisis sports car (ok, that’s a lie). But the tunes do seem to point to a lost time when the hippies of yore mated with the capitalists of now – a time where you could care about the people you were swindling money out of. Where, put simply, you could have your cake and eat it too. But the honest truth is that only a select few can marry lyrical honesty and highly produced wanking douchery without the eventual messy divorce. Wilco, in my humble opinion, is not one of the few. The overly produced feeling of Sky Blue Sky, at least in contrast to earlier material, works to detract from the emotionally driven lyrics contained therein. There was a time when I scoffed upon hearing that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was “experimental.” And I can certainly see the validity in that statement, in comparison to the extremely normal and in fact rather boring Sky Blue Sky.

Wilco tried to create an album that would appeal to both the critics and the masses alike and failed rather miserably. The album went on to sell relatively well of course, and some songs were even featured in a Volkswagen ad campaign, but the depth and emotion contained in previous albums just wasn’t there. In the end, Tweedy was more concerned with stroking the neck of his guitar than stimulating the pleasure receptors in the brain.

Last Word:

Wilco’s sixth and tamest album finds the alt-country heroes curbing their more experimental tendencies in favor of watered-down AOR and dueling guitar solos; many, many dueling guitar solos.

Review By:
Brian Webster, Staff Writer

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