Subject: Review: Wilco's Surprise Album 'Star Wars' Is a Random Act of Love - The Atlantic
From: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
To: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2015 08:22:20 -0400

Review: Wilco's Surprise Album 'Star Wars' Is a Random Act of Love - The
Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/wilcos-star-wars-is-a-random-act-of-love/398993/?utm_source=SFFB

Wilco's Star Wars Is a Random Act of Love

Why is the new Wilco album called *Star Wars*, and why is its cover a
painting of a fluffy white cat? Here’s hoping that we never really find
out. “I cry / at a joke / explained,” Jeff Tweedy sings four songs in, his
voice a vampy impression of Bob Dylan’s as the band lays down a fuzz-rock
flamenco backing. The rest of the song is a barrage of riddles: “It's a
staring contest in a hall of mirrors / I sweat tears, but I don't ever cry.”

The song, “The Joke Explained,” is a worthy entry in Wilco’s long catalogue
of songs that capture the idea of life as impossible to capture. Whether
we’re all speakers speaking in code
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPqQ2AWShqc> or one-way radios
transmitting nonsense
<http://genius.com/1657939/Irdial-phonetic-alphabet-nato/Yankee-hotel-foxtrot>,
Wilco’s adventuresome yet consistently tuneful music says that it’s normal
and sometimes glorious to misunderstand and be misunderstood
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_HBJ5sHcJU>*. *As they’ve kept chugging
into middle age, this core artistic premise has often been obscured by the
dismissive description “dad-rock,” factually accurate though it may be
(after all, Tweedy recently put out a record with his teenage son). *Star
Wars*, the band’s ninth album, released by surprise and for free on the
Internet, reminds that Wilco aren’t just reliable, safe rockers; they’re
some of the most generous experimentalists to ever pick up guitars.

A crackling 33-minute trip, the album has way more in common with ‘90s
indie pranksters like Pavement than it does with the Americana scene that
Wilco’s long been associated with. While a few of these songs won’t stick
in listeners’ heads for long, all of them feature a delightful sonic twist
of some sort. You can tell what mood they’re in within a second of turning
on the opener “EKG,” an instrumental whose migraine-frequency guitar stabs
eventually lock onto a kraut groove that suggests liftoff into another
world. In that world, we get a tune like “More…,” which sounds a bit like
Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” except for the fact that its riffs pan between
ears and the song drowns itself in distortion before the three-minute mark.

There’s precisely one track that sounds like the stereotype of a Wilco
song—“Taste the Ceiling,” featuring acoustic strum, some soloing, and a
tempo suited for lo-fi rom-com montages. It’s fine. Far more wonderful is
the closer, “Magnetized,” which uses soft organ pulses and a theremin to
portray love as something that warps a person as surely as an electromagnet
warps a TV set. Another would-be ballad, “Where Do I Begin,” interrupts its
lullaby for a punk-psychedelic eruption in its final seconds. I wish the
band had rode that noise wave longer, maybe adding a soaring chorus on top
of it. But doing so might have defeated the point of the album—ambitions
low, surprise factor high.

Eric D. Schwerin
[email-masked]

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