Print-friendly Version
Album Review: Wilco, "Sky Blue Sky" (Nonesuch)
Wilco has always had tension. In more than 10 years, the band maintained just two original members; it endured a label drop (and rescue); documentation by book and on film; and a leader in Jeff Tweedy who struggled to escape the shadow of a previous band, then his bandmates, then addictions. Through it all, the music thrived. Songs bent to their breaking points, fused influences--Beach Boys, Beatles, Television, folk-rock greats--and most of all, they worked, not in spite of the tension, but because of it.
This is why "Sky Blue Sky," Wilco's sixth album, is a shocker. Tweedy--with a voice usually so pained and urgent, who started an album five years ago with, "I am an American aquarium drinker"--begins "Sky" like this: "Maybe the sun will shine today/The clouds will roll away ... I will try to understand/Either way." Clearly, this is a band that's found contentment; Tweedy has even said this album was the easiest to record. But, for a band fueled on pressure, is happiness a good thing?
On first listen, there's reason to think it's not. Much of the music leans toward '70s rock: that starter, "Either Way," with its peaceful, Harry Nilsson feeling; the Grateful Dead-like vamps in "Shake it Off" and "Walken." And a few songs, like "Leave Me (Like You Found Me)," drift in so subtly they create almost no impact.
Yet, that Wilco unwillingness to just settle down is still undeniable here. "Impossible Germany" and "Side With the Seeds" ramp up, relax and break into inventive sound; "You Are My Face" starts deceptively folksy, then bursts with pointed guitar, Hammond organ and Tweedy crying: "I have no idea how this happens/All of my maps have been overthrown." The songs that seem to return to the band's early alt-country-ness--"Please Be Patient With Me," "What Light"--have much more intricacy than anything on "A.M." or "Being There." And there's evidence of the completely new: "On and On and On," lovely in its pulsing piano, makes a vibrant closer.
Oh, there will forever be enough tension outside of a band in life, in love. "My blessings get so blurred," Tweedy sings mid-album, "at the sound of your words." But "Sky" demonstrates that it works, too, for Wilco to build on all they've learned--through touring, through new collaborators, through all the upheaval and stress--even if that means being a band that gets along. One that feels, of all the impossible things, kind of happy.
