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If you’ve managed to avoid slipping into a coma over the past couple of years, you know the story of Wilco. No way around it. Just in case, though, here’s the thumbnail: Esteemed band turns in fourth long-player, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; band’s label (Reprise, spearheaded by then-A&R chief David Kahne) rejects said long-player, claiming lack of commercial viability; band refuses to make suggested alternations; band and label (read: evil corporate leviathan) part ways; band re-sells very same long-player to arty boutique label Nonesuch—another division of very same parent company; in so doing, band successfully sticks it to Man, becoming generation’s anti-evil-corporate-leviathan hero. That nightmare/triumph is captured by documentary film crew, subsequently released to art houses as I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, only furthers band’s cachet, making Yankee Hotel Foxtrot not only critical smash, but certified-gold critical smash.
A fine end, indeed, to a modern-day art v. commerce David & Goliath tale. Only this particular tale’s central figure is Jeff Tweedy, singer-songwriter-bleeding heart behind Wilco. In other words, there can be no end. Because if there’s one thing that Wilco’s albums—1995’s A.M., 1996’s Being There, 1999’s Summerteeth, and 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—have demonstrated, it’s that meaning is open to interpretation, and conclusions (especially those punctuated by grand statements) are maddeningly elusive.
Which brings us to A Ghost Is Born, the highly anticipated follow-up to the feature presentation that became Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, itself a move away from the group’s alt-country roots and orchestral-pop excursions. If Foxtrot found the boys cranking up the avante-fragmentation dial, slicing, dicing, and mincing coherent and often brilliant songcraft with blips, bleeps, and other ambient flavors, Ghost is the dragging of those experimental ways, occasionally kicking and screaming, to their logical conclusion (involving, yup, a distinct lack thereof).
Please, don’t be lulled by the country quaintness of “Company In My Back” or the straightforward groove of “Handshake Drugs.” Wilco’s most audacious release yet, A Ghost Is Born can be an extraordinarily frustrating listen—a few pure-pop gems frayed at the edges, surrounded by a clutch of interminable jams and electro-pop static, all coated in a blanket of hangover fog. Clocking in at 15 minutes, the album’s centerpiece, “Less Than You Think,” lays bare what there is of a theme: “There is so much less to this than you think,” Tweedy warbles in his pack-a-day rasp. And just like that, meaning is vanished, conclusions ripped away. Fittingly, his anti-message comes dressed in a whisper-thin piano ballad . . . pillow-smothered by an eight-minute squall of feedback.
Again, “Less Than You Think” is by no means an isolated occurrence. Oh, no. “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” is ten minutes of fingernails-on-chalkboard Krautrock. “At Least That’s What You Said,” a chronicle of an abusive relationship, spins out on a jam-band guitar solo ideal for a baked afternoon with The String Cheese Incident and a Hacky Sack. Helmed by noise-pop virtuoso Jim O’Rourke, Ghost frequently runs the risk of alienating even the most diehard of Wilco fans (y’know, the “they’re the American Radiohead!” types who claim “artistic landmark!!” five years before the album’s release). Slipping in and out of narrative coherence, frequently frail to the point of disappearing, schizophrenic in the non-rock-critic meaning of the word . . . and so it goes.
But, then, right about the time of the 20th listen, something unexpected happens. The songs begin to sink in, making an odd sort of sense. It’s not a sudden thing—more like the fog lifting and a vague statement emerging from the electrically charged ether. A Ghost Is Born, a collection that appeared to be little more than a bunch of half-baked piano ditties surrounded by great heaps of noise, takes on a broader sonic design. Nothing concrete, mind you. More like a suggestion that was there all along, only to make itself known in Tweedy Time—which is precisely the commitment required for a Wilco album to grow from “solid effort” to “indispensable companion.” Ghost will likely never be the latter, but it’s one hell of a rewarding, if demanding, collection—another intriguing chapter in a gripping, ever-unfolding story.
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| —Steven Chean |
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