“I keep on singing
Your eyes, they just roll
It sounds like someone else’s song
From a long time ago”
— Jeff Tweedy, “Someone Else’s Song”
It’s tempting at times to take Tweedy at his word, even knowing his penchant for obfuscation and sarcasm. Sure, he’s made a series of great-sounding, if ever more pretentious, albums since Uncle Tupelo’s dissolution ten years ago. But it’s telling that his best records since then have been the Mermaid Avenue volumes, projects for which he helped supply melodies for someone else’s lyrics.
You certainly can play spot-the-influences with Wilco’s new album. The leadoff track, “At Least That’s What You Said”, goes from dissonant, subdued piano a la Sister Lovers to dissonant, arc-welding guitar a la Sleeps With Angels. Track two, “Hell Is Chrome”, is elegiac, mid-tempo piano rock a la Mott The Hoople, while track three, the ten-minute-plus “Spiders”, is metronomic Krautrock in search of Daydream Nation. Track four, “Muzzle Of Bees”, sounds like an outtake from Pink Moon; number five, “Hummingbird”, is baroque pop classicism lifted from Magical Mystery Tour, complete with a fake British accent.
OK, I’ll stop. Besides, the less said about “Less Than You Think”, the smirking, half-hour Eno homage, the better (and doubtless the bald one would agree). This isn’t to say that much of the new Wilco record isn’t beautifully executed and preserved — big shout-out to engineer Chris Shaw for the latter; it’s just not very fresh.
Rock of course needn’t be original to be good, as the Strokes and the White Stripes most recently (and famously) have reminded us. And it certainly helps if the music is felt, deeply if possible, and Tweedy’s latest batch of songs definitely is that — too much so, perhaps.
The album’s leitmotif concerns finding one’s place in the world, and from his migraines and anxiety attacks to his record-label hassles and recent stint in rehab for addiction to painkillers, Tweedy has reason to be searching his soul. Trouble is, his revelations are bereft of insight. “I’m a wheel,” he announces, rather prosaically on one song. “I’m an ocean of emotion,” he chirps on another.
Elsewhere, he plays the victim with a “purple black eye” and is otherwise self-absorbed or misunderstood. “Theologians don’t know nothing about my soul,” he complains. Huh?
If only he had revisited 1996’s “Someone Else’s Song” before consigning that bon mot to the Wilco canon. Most salutary in this case, regardless of whether Tweedy originally intended them to be ironic or not, would have been the lines, “I can’t tell you anything/You don’t already know/I keep on trying/I should just let it go.”
