Wilco

Schmilco

Schmilco is Wilco’s most musically simple and emotionally resonant record in a decade, gorgeously naked and efficient.

Without question, Schmilco is Wilco’s quietest, most disquieting album. And if Tweedy’s soul-baring amid these artfully austere backdrops constitutes a performance, it’s a pretty convincing one.

It’s hard to convince the cool kids that this record’s quiet rebellion is worth hearing because it’s not drowned in irony or heady guitar parts or electronic sonics or whatever langue du jour. It’s simply, as mentioned, unpretentious, unassuming, and crucially, good music.

It's ... an album that so sincerely accepts maturation beyond supposed stasis, or prurient middle-age crises, that it should make us drop the term “dad rock” as a pejorative and accept that it can also be used as a description of high art.

Even as another merely good Wilco album ... Schmilco does pay plentiful dividends for listeners patient enough to discover its gradually revealed riches.

It seems like, two decades in, they’re knowingly recording the type of instant back catalogue albums that future completists will discover and cherish another twenty years from now.

A moving, disquieting experience, sweetness and fear mingling together as the summer fades into autumn. 

More than any Wilco record before, Schmilco dwells on the fact that life is funny but also heavy as hell.

On Wilco’s 10th album, the group’s enthusiasm is packed away in the boot along with the musty blankets and empty water bottles.

Schmilco is an acoustic record but not a slow one—thank God—which proves the right vehicle for the band’s loosest, most unadorned set of songs since its debut.

Along with its return to bedrock sounds, the album seems especially shaped by the Midwestern-ness that's always defined the Chicago-based crew.

Schmilco feels simple and declarative on first glance, but the deeper one is willing to dig, the more there is to find, both in terms of the band's interplay and Tweedy's songs.