A record of cunning redundancies, dead space and beautifully rendered details that double back upon themselves, Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky is aptly titled. On last year’s side project, Loose Fur’s Born Again In The USA, Jeff Tweedy perfected a blithe, funny, self-deprecating take on any number of skewed rock ‘n’ roll verities. That record’s “The Ruling Class” was a great piece of summery pop, and Born Again put one in mind of the dislocations of Captain Beefheart; there was an agitated, terse, steely quality to the playing that transcended pastiche.
Sky Blue Sky works in a similar fashion. Tweedy’s lyrics portray a songwriter — and a human being, although it’s often difficult to tell exactly how sincere Tweedy’s slightly hoarse, slightly self-pitying voice is attempting to be — who knows something is going on around him, but seems content to “sit on the couch alone” and watch the world pass by. In “Hate It Here”, he occupies himself with mundane tasks like sweeping the floor, checks his phone for messages that aren’t there, and finally acknowledges that “you don’t live here anymore.”
If that sounds like no fun, the way Tweedy and company work the details is satisfying, and often inspired. “Either Way” links musical sections together in a manner that lays out the album’s strategy. “Impossible Germany” features an amazing guitar solo and a section of twinned guitars that seems like a parody of that staple of ’70s rock. The swinging flatted-fifth blues riff that powers “Shake It Off” gives way to a series of foreshortened interjections which seem a little violent. “Hate It Here” rolls out a lumbering interlude straight off an old Roy Wood record, right down to the overstated drum fills.
That Sky Blue Sky functions on the edge of parody is a positive thing. Ever since 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Tweedy has explored the gap between what lyrics can say and what musical and production values can signify. In this, he’s heir to the legacy of disturbed, metastasized pop embodied on records such as Big Star’s Third. I was one of the listeners who found Yankee Hotel a bit sodden, and more than a little overrated, but that might have had to do as much with my perception that Tweedy was trying too hard as with any assessment of its not inconsiderable formal virtues.
Here, the guitar playing — by Tweedy and the very elegant Nels Cline — is worth the price of admission, and Glenn Kotche’s drumming is superb, as it was on Born Again. There are many inspired touches that fade away almost before you catch them, such as the faint piano which closes out “You Are My Face” and the cymbal taps in “Leave Me (Like You Found Me)”. They even manage to evoke New Orleans-style studio rock in “Walken”, which, with its slide guitar and expert piano, could almost be an outtake from Beefheart’s Bluejeans And Moonbeams.
There’s a difference between “New Orleans-style” and New Orleans. Everything about Sky Blue Sky feels second-or-third-hand; Wilco’s achievement is to make this part of their statement. The lyrics question their own sincerity, as when Tweedy sings, “I believe in locomotion/But I’ve turned to rust as we’ve discussed.” He seems to acknowledge this third-hand quality and even revel in it as a source of inner strength in a line such as, “Just remember what was yours is everyone’s from now on.” Of course, Tweedy might have that wrong: It could be that what was everyone’s is now his, but not for long.
Any artist worthy of the name knows that art lies in the details, and that there are times when one’s intentions become helplessly tangled up in the very method of expressing them. It’s a fruitful tangle, and the best American pop artists have spent time untying that knot, only to tie it back again.