Cousin
by Wilco
On the release of last year’s Cruel Country, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy said they had never been comfortable about being considered “alt-country”.
Fair enough, because their 1999 album Summerteeth was along the axis of embellished pastoral pop and power-pop. Its follow-up, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002), was a swerve into experimental alt-rock, as courageous and different as U2′s Achtung Baby (1991) and Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997) had been in their careers.
After the groundbreaking YHF, Tweedy could take Wilco wherever he pleased: Dylanesque country-rock, demanding rock, folk-rock, acoustic songs, mainstream pop …
But with Cruel Country, they embraced not alt-country – a genre Tweedy felt had become conservative and stagnant – but a kind of neo-traditional country.
Given Wilco’s unpredictability, Cousin would never be similar to Cruel Country, certainly not when produced by the daringly experimental Welsh musician Cate Le Bon.
Outside influences have benefited Wilco: avant-guitarist Jim O’Rourke came in for the disruptive Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and co-produced their wonderful 2004 follow-up, A Ghost Is Born.
Le Bon’s fingerprints are rarely obvious on Cousin, but are there in the electro-beat and static ending of Infinite Surprise, moulding Tweedy’s downbeat Ten Dead, about yet another mass shooting, into a muted neopsychedelic mini-epic (part country-blues, part weary-Beatles 1968), and for the melodically angular and haiku-like lyrics of Sunlight Ends, which evolve from faltering beats and half-complete melodies: “You dance like the dust in the light where the sun comes in. And I’m following ‘til the sunlight ends.”
Lyrics are refined, mysterious, opaque and spare (Tweedy speak-sings A Bowl and a Pudding, where an enchanting melody gradually emerges), and Le Bon allows his sand-blown vocals to rest easily in the luminous pop simplicity of Evicted: “I’m evicted from your heart, I deserve it.”
The title track is a crisp percussion-driven piece with New Wave inflections; the tired Levee has a weaving guitar line in the mid-ground; and although Pittsburgh opens like backporch acoustic folk, it develops into a disconcerting landscape of synths and a low rumination: “Time slows like a new van Gogh, setting fire to the frame. I’m a flag where the wind won’t blow.”
If Cruel Country was Wilco circling back to their origins, Cousin takes a gently deft approach to the experimentation that they’ve explored.
It’s identifiably Wilco. But different.
Weren’t they always?
Laugh Track
by the National
First Two Pages of Frankenstein, by the National just six months ago, was a solemn song cycle about a relationship in tatters, drilling down into the mundane details of dividing up possessions: “What about the instruments? What about the Cowboy Junkies?” I described it as “elegantly delivered despondency”.
This new album has 12 songs recorded shortly after the band’s previous release. It comes with a cover referring to the artwork of FTPoF, so it can be read as a companion piece to its predecessor. A similar mood prevails, and it isn’t the counterpoint laugh track.
The opener, Alphabet City, announces, “I’m not over it, don’t know what it is. I can’t get there”, and “I will listen for you at the door”.
Deep End, which follows, offers little respite for the writer or listener: “I can’t stop myself from thinking about you all the time. I’m always trying to tune you out.”
These are beautifully played, atmospheric songs, but the album rolls out like further public therapy for Matt Berninger and prosaic details are picked apart again on Turn Off the House: “Put everything in boxes, your head in a paper bag. Leave all the windows open, leave the beds unmade.”
There are alluring songs here, like the featherlight Dreaming (“I sleep for an hour. I’m up for now. All this makes me think of you”), and guest Phoebe Bridgers (back from FTPoF) appears on the title track as a reassuring voice: “I can’t even say what it’s about, all I am is shreds of doubt. So turn on the laugh track.”
It’s an emotionally wearying if artfully realised journey to Rosanne Cash on Crumble (“I’m gonna crumble”) and the seven-minute-plus closer, Smoke Detector, where Beat poet, stream-of-consciousness imagery is given a kick by the relentless groove. It’s as if elegant despondency is finally being relegated.
Let’s hope so. These albums have often sounded like the wallowing of a troubled soul.
These albums are available digitally, on CD and vinyl.
The National play Auckland’s Spark Arena, February 24; and Wellington’s TSB Arena (Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts), February 25.
