Wilco (The Album) has a beautifully warm production sound with parts that are gently layered and blended into each other to the extent that it’s difficult at times to discern guitars from keyboards and synthesizers.
It's an album in the classic sense of The Band and Nevermind, beautifully conceived to reflect misgivings about its changing era, and executed with the kind of intelligence that can fool one into thinking it's instinctive.
Wilco {The Album) ultimately serves as a statement that the band isn’t bored with their steadiness, but is instead reveling in the opportunity to explore it from different angles. It’s a collection of gorgeous, well-written songs, and asking for more is unnecessary – and unfair to the band. Let them be happy.
Jeff Tweedy has got the balance just right, with a collection of unflaggingly high-quality, Beatles-y tunes, less tormented than of old and with a yearning, uplifting summery spirit.
Wilco (The Album) is as consummate as anything its author has yet delivered.
Wilco (the album) picks up more or less where 2007’s mellow and soulful Sky Blue Sky left off, but subtly expands that record’s parameters.
If Wilco (The Album) as a whole is considerably less ambitious than its predecessors, it compensates with its easy confidence and craft: it's the work of a band that knows their strengths and knows what they're all about, and it's ready to settle into an agreeably comfortable groove.
Wilco (the album), the band's seventh studio effort, treats verse-chorus-verse basics like holy truths. The result is the rare rock album about acceptance. And it's fantastic.
The album blends well and leaves the listener relaxed and feeling like they had an experience with the music. The album, overall, will draw more similarities to Sky Blue Sky, than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but it includes enough moments of beauty to be viewed as a necessary progression in Wilco tapestry.
The back half of Wilco (The Album) is too sing-song-y, too underdeveloped, too “good enough.” This band is capable of so much more.
Tweedy's ability to craft great hooks does make this worth a listen, and maybe the band simply needs a pause to catch its creative breath. Let's just hope the next one isn't called Wilco (another album).
The album is full of thoughtful, artfully crafted lyrics wrapped in memorable hooks that should stand the test of time. What’s missing is the experimentation that was Wilco’s hallmark until Sky Blue Sky.
At this point in Wilco's 15-year history, the band have been a lot of things, all of them sort of nebulous: alt-country, Americana, neo-folk, quasi-experimental, and, if you insist, "dad rock." Miraculously, the disparate strains within the group's catalog have somehow flowed together into a unifying aesthetic, largely due to Jeff Tweedy's distinctive singing voice and remarkable consistency as a songwriter. Though their previous releases, particularly the schizoid A Ghost Is Born, have embraced this eclecticism, the band's seventh proper LP, Wilco (The Album), does just what the title implies, and consolidates their style into a coherent statement of identity.
The band's current six-member lineup, together five years and responsible for 2007's stunning "Sky Blue Sky," is its strongest to date-and Wilco (The Album) is as well-rounded an effort as the group has released.
The album rumbles out of the gate with a scruffy exuberance reminiscent of the early tracks of Summerteeth, before finding its way back to the high-end country art rock the band has specialized in since we first found out Tweedy gets bad headaches.
While (the album) tips far more convincingly on the successful end of the scales, there remains the sense of a band playing safer than needs be; a sextet pushing against their limits but never straining outright at them.
The major problem is that this doesn’t sound like a band that’s pushing itself any more, or at least not making the same sort of pushes that lead to the brilliant sucker-punch of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the vastly underrated A Ghost Is Born.
There is much to love, but almost as much to care less about on Wilco (The Album). It’s no doubt a recommended listen, but before long, you’ll be skipping tracks left and right.
It doesn't help that Wilco is such a complacent album, so easily redolent of sounds and textures the band has called up in the past.
Wilco’s success is largely due to their ability to continually surprise, if not outright confound, their audience. Their first five albums saw the band transform from alt-country torchbearers to Wall-of-Sound sculptors to post-rock deconstructionists. Facilitating this transformation was a steady rotation of band members, moving both into and then out of the ranks, eventually leaving frontman Jeff Tweedy and bassist John Stirratt as the only two orig
inal members. Looking back over their career, it’s easy to see that this constant shuffling of members propelled Wilco’s sonic evolution.
It’s no (career low-point) Sky Blue Sky, but Wilco is far from their best work. The overall conclusion is one of fleeting moments of piercing greatness rather than outand-out uniform brilliance.
Wilco (The Album) isn’t a failure — not by any means — but when a band has become so attached to the notion of change and then stagnates, it casts a heavy shadow that's hard to escape.
Wilco (The Funny Birthday Camel)
Favourite tracks: One Wing, Solitaire, ★ Everlasting Everything
Wilco - 9/16
The camel is so real.
Honestly, “Wilco (The Album)” feels like a “Sky Blue Sky”-lite to me. It carries on with that same Americana sound only this time the highs are way less high and the lows way less low. It manages to stay pretty consistently okay which for a band as great as Wilco’s self-titled record is just a bit disappointing.
Especially cuts like the insanely boring “I’ll Fight” or the closer which is so awkwardly ... read more
this is uh. a weird one. i'm not really sure where to even begin.
not all of it is weird and that's exactly what makes it so weird. at its core, this is a classic Americana album, y'know, indie rock that wants to be country but back in the good ole days when country sounded good, sounds that are only retrospectively considered country because rock used to be a lot more yeehaw than we give it credit for. all that. lots of Bowie, Beatles, and Velvet Underground vibes, which are all artists that ... read more
Wilco - 9/16
The camel is so real.
Honestly, “Wilco (The Album)” feels like a “Sky Blue Sky”-lite to me. It carries on with that same Americana sound only this time the highs are way less high and the lows way less low. It manages to stay pretty consistently okay which for a band as great as Wilco’s self-titled record is just a bit disappointing.
Especially cuts like the insanely boring “I’ll Fight” or the closer which is so awkwardly ... read more
Album/EP each day for 1 year
Day 16: Wilco - Wilco (The Album)
If anyone has suggestions for albums or EPs for future days, please tell me :)
it's... okay?
favourite track: one wing (100)
least favourite track: sonny feeling (55)
Wilco (The Funny Birthday Camel)
Favourite tracks: One Wing, Solitaire, ★ Everlasting Everything
1 | Wilco (The Song) 2:58 | 72 |
2 | Deeper Down 2:59 | 75 |
3 | One Wing 3:42 | 90 |
4 | Bull Black Nova 5:39 | 79 |
5 | You and I 3:26 | 82 |
6 | You Never Know 4:21 | 75 |
7 | Country Disappeared 4:02 | 74 |
8 | Solitaire 3:04 | 90 |
9 | I'll Fight 4:23 | 84 |
10 | Sonny Feeling 4:13 | 74 |
11 | Everlasting Everything 3:58 | 87 |
#7 | / | NPR |
#7 | / | Uncut |
#12 | / | Amazon |
#15 | / | The Line of Best Fit |
#16 | / | Rolling Stone |
#18 | / | Stereogum |
#20 | / | No Ripcord |
#21 | / | musicOMH |
#21 | / | Paste |
#24 | / | PopMatters |