Alternate post title: “Borch and Christine, Upon Hearing Three Tracks from Sky Blue Sky, Attempt to Eloquently Shoot the Shit about What Things One Might Expect of the New Wilco Album.”
Christine: My first impression upon hearing a handful of new tracks from Sky Blue Sky: “Wow, no one told me Wilco were releasing a B-sides album.” Let me explain.
I grew up in a small town-turned-small city in Northern California, a vast region of the West in which you can find pockets of devoted aficionadoes of the “Western” lifestyle. It’s true that San Francisco was coming down from the era of jockey short dance-offs and poppers, but two hours away in the Sacramento Valley, it was all about spurs and Skoal. One of my first memories of my hometown involves sitting on a haystack in a parking lot at a strip mall grand opening while the adults drank cans of beer. It was simultaneously quaint and generic.
There’s something about these tracks that feels the same way to me–like they were pulled out of some previous era. They’re anachronistic and comforting–they feel like the kind of stuff that should have been playing on the speakers of my dad’s metallic brown Pontiac 6000 en route to an early weekend morning breakfast at the Stagecoach, our favorite restaurant at the aforementioned strip mall–but they’re also too familiar, particularly in terms of lyrics, to really set the band apart.
Borch: I, on the other hand, come from a suburb of Cleveland where Michael Stanley is still considered ‘far out’, and summarily, I treasure the organic quality of any music that isn’t trying too hard. That might have given me over to a lot of music that’s just plain lazy, but it also saved me from insufferable obedience to Pink Floyd.
The fabulous shock of discovering something that isn’t overproduced wore off long ago after I stopped listening to Harvest every night. But trickery-free music is a pleasure in of itself, and that’s why I’ve always found Wilco so engaging. The three tracks I’ve heard–”You Are My Face,” “Either Way” and “Walken”–do sound like outtakes, which is to say that it’s more of what Wilco is best at doing and has been for a long time. That’s the advantage of such anachronistic music–if it sounds like it could have been around for decades already, it stands a better chance at remaining relevant for at least that long into the future.
Christine’s right, though: there isn’t much in the new material to set it apart from the rest of the Wilco catalogue (except from the unmistakably bleak A Ghost is Born), but that’s not the same as repetitive. Repetitive is boring, and the senses are heightened by these new offerings, as a function of their familiarity.
Christine: Actually, I do think that some of these offerings ARE repetitive.
“Either Way” and “Walken” fall way short lyrically, and, on the musical front, are difficult to distinguish from some of Wilco’s contemporaries. Sure, I like that sort of honky-tonk piano thing going on in “Walken,” but when Jeff Tweedy breaks from his croon to belt out lyrics, I can’t help but hear Jack White. It doesn’t help that Tweedy’s lyrics in this song aren’t particularly interesting: “The more I think about it, the more I know it’s true/The more I think about, the more I know it’s you.” (Perhaps the banality of the lyrics and the intentional misspelling of “Walken” mean that this song is actually a trenchant critique of Christopher Walken’s tendency to pull humor out of his ass, but that’s a bit of a leap for the listener to make.)
And to me, “Either Way” sounds like a diluted version of “NYC Sunshine,” one of the weaker tracks on Lloyd Cole’s otherwise good 2006 release Antidepressant. It’s one thing to do anachronism well; doing anachronism in ways that mimic one’s contemporaries who’ve also done anachronism well is, well, repetitive.
But that’s just based on those two tracks–if the album is more like “You Are My Face,” I think I’m likelier to like it as a whole. I’m a fan of the latter track because it dovetails with–rather than repeats–Wilco’s catalogue (or what I’ve heard thereof) quite nicely–it follows in the style of that sort of ringing, quiet pop that I’ve enjoyed from them previously, and the lyrics have the kind of tight rhyme and insight that makes Tweedy at his best not just a talented musician, but a good writer. Lines like “faces stitched in sewing, or houses hemmed into homes” are the kind of thing that makes me not at all surprised that he was an attendee at AWP in Chicago a few years back (true story: one of my friends actually ran into and had a “moment” with him).
Borch: A moment with Tweedy? My girlfriend would like a “moment” with him, so I’d better keep a watchful eye out the next time Wilco’s back in town. Yes, “You Are My Face” is the strongest of the three, lyrically and otherwise. But Wilco has always toyed w/ the pedantic and usually arrives at revelatory, like the moment a cliche rings true. These are not remarkable tracks, I grant you, and are better suited to setting up the big hits that we (hopefully) haven’t heard yet, but it’s three tracks… enough to make us cautious, but not quite disappointed.
Now that you mention the Christopher Walken connection, I wonder if you’re more right than you know. Here’s a hypothetical situation: Walken walks (ha ha!) onto the set of SNL, he looks into the camera and the audience erupts in laughter. “Why are you laughing? He hasn’t even done anything yet.” Fool! It’s because he’s Christopher Walken, and THAT’s funny. Wilco makes three songs that don’t really do anything, but for some reason are better than the same songs done by any other band. “Why?” Well, it’s Wilco, for one. For two, it’s Wilco, for Chrissakes.
Yes, it is unexceptional for Tweedy & Crew, but I don’t hear them lamely emulating their peers–more like falling short of the band’s own expectations and abilities. Given the strength of Wilco’s live set, there should be no fear of malaise setting in, and I’m excited to hear the whole of the new release. “Walken” sounded much better at Lollapalooza, and I do admit that “Either Way” makes me reticent, but if the caliber of “You Are My Face” is the norm for Sky Blue Sky, then rest easy, fans–it’s gonna be okay.
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Some alternate album titles Tweedy, et. al., considered: ‘I Have Become a Really Good Guitar Player the Past 10 Years and I Want You to Hear It,’ ‘Man, I Really Love Jamming with My Band in Studio,’ and ‘Why Write Tight, Three-Minutes Songs When a Six-Minute Wankfest Will Do?’ ”
That said, I like it.
OK, maybe I’m being a little unfair, and maybe I need to give the whole album a listen, but what I’ve heard thus far really hasn’t impressed me as much as ‘A.M.’ and ‘Being There’ — two albums that were basically the woof to the warp of ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’ of my late-high school and early-college years. Is the fog of nostalgia obscuring imperfections of past work, blinding me to the possibilities of the present? Maybe. But I think Wilco may have started to struggle under the weight of critical acclaim and self-importance after “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” and ‘A Ghost is Born’ was an interesting, opioid-besotted tangent. And I dunno, at least from hearing a couple of tracks from ‘Sky Blue Sky,’ I still get a sense that the group has almost arrived in a better, more mature place — but not quite: still fighting the last vestiges of demons, trying to do something “different” because, they’re, well, Wilco and have a rep to live up to. Or maybe I’m hearing too much in between the lines, so to speak.
What a disappointing take on what is truly a beautiful album. I’d be curious to know what you guys think after you hear the entire thing. I would never call Sky Blue Sky unexceptional.
@ jesus, etc.– a review of the full album was subsequently posted here.
hi nice site.
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Comment by joiezabel — March 6, 2007 @ 6:17 pm
nice review. sky blue sky was heavily played on joie’s itunes today, folks, and let’s just say that it made me wonder if prairies still exist. because listening to the album while riding across one on a horse would be pretty awesome. i dig it WAY more than i thought i was going to.
also…
q: what’s the opposite of christopher reeves?
a: christopher walken! ha ha, i’m here every week. tip your bartender.
(props to zak for the joke.)