ALBUM REVIEW: Wilco Gets Cozily Avant-Garde on Cate Le Bon-Produced ‘Cousin’

For any long-running band, particularly one as critically acclaimed and tenured as Wilco, a new album invariably arrives with lower and lower stakes. Somewhere in the late 2000s, you could feel this happening to the group. As the lineup solidified and reached new commercial heights live, it became clear that the band’s legacy would always safely rest in their incredible, genre-hopping run from 1998’s Being There up through 2007’s Sky Blue Sky, more or less.

Wilco (photo by Peter Crosby)

Cousin, the band’s 13th studio album, arrives with many of the hallmarks of a band trying to buck this sentiment. It’s not just that it’s the first album since Sky Blue Sky to utilize an outside producer, but in the Welsh art-pop experimenter Cate Le Bon you have an artist known for her mercurial and transgressive approach. The band’s collaboration with Le Bon was reportedly born from an improvisational jam session at their eclectic, experimental Solid Sound Festival, after which frontman Jeff Tweedy brought her into the long-gestating recording sessions to push the band creatively.

It can be tough to point exactly to where Le Bon made her impact most felt, in part because this is already a band widely comfortable with experimentation, but Cousin definitely sounds like a band tenderly crafting unorthodox arrangements and layers of sound in direct contrast to last year’s Cruel Country (ND review). While still largely reminiscent of 2019’s Ode to Joy (ND review) in its mixture of low-stakes power pop and avant-folk ruminations, the songs here are peppered with a kind of unsettling darkness, from quietly menacing synths and bits of distortion to electronic processing and slapback delays, all of which play to the band’s avant strengths.

Opener “Infinite Surprise” is clearly a statement of purpose in this regard, building from minimalist guitar strums and percussion to a dastardly horn-and-noise freakout that swells and fades and swells again. The mid-album centerpiece “A Bowl and A Pudding” features a similar trick, with a quietly beautifully pastoral bit of fingerpicked guitar gradually becoming enveloped in darkness through ghostly bits of vocal layering; eerie, buried-in-the-mix synths; and throbbing-yet-jazzy drums from Glenn Kotche.

Still, the net effect is not a return to the grand statements of the late 1990s and early 2000s so much as a distinctive entry that still fits comfortably in the band’s latter-day output. For all of the ornamental arrangement flourishes, songs like “Evicted,” the title track, and the closing “Meant to Be” are the kind of warm-hearted, easygoing power-pop that have peppered many a Wilco record, while “Sunlight Ends,” Pittsburgh,” and “Soldier Child” meet the impressionistic folk song quota.

If that sounds dismissive, it shouldn’t really. Wilco has long established these bones of a Wilco record, and the writing here is resiliently excellent. But, alas, there is an inherent comfort in Tweedy’s vocal delivery that feels telling, for both him and the audience. This is a band to cozily luxuriate in these days, not one to upset. Which might be for the best.

Wilco’s Cousin is out Sept. 29 on dBpm Records.