Spectreview: Wilco – Ode To Joy

-LIGHT SLATE BLUE-

For a guide to the review color rating system, click here.

“Where the sunlight grabs the lake
It’s frozen in the flames
Beneath the sleeping town
With  the riots raining down
It’s all yours now
It’s all for you”

God, to age as gracefully as Jeff Tweedy would be a miracle. It’s not just in the sense that he’s becoming the kind of wizened songwriter that blessedly maintains a notable creativity, like how we used to look to Bob Dylan or, perhaps still, to Tom Waits. Like all of us eventually, Tweedy was put through the ringer of human existence and came out a lopsided, deeply scarred individual that nonetheless makes the most out of that personal pain. Coming to terms with your suffering is its own rite of passage, but so many of us get lost in our own worlds, and the words of others, that for many of us it never happens. Then we are doomed to a living purgatory where we start to feebly reclaim the lives we feel we’ve lost, paying for expensive purchases and risky behaviors with hurt loved ones and broken promises. Tweedy’s experienced all this, but unlike most of the formative men in his life, he’s remained expressively honest about his failures and his weaknesses, and his art has benefitted greatly from that self-examination.

Tweedy’s band, the one-revered paragon of outré Americana that is Wilco, have been maligned as “dad-rock” for almost fifteen years now, but it feels like only recently that he’s rewritten the sentiment behind that dismissive label into something more transcendental. Being a father, especially back when boundary-pushing rock remained the field of youth, means the light has to have been extinguished for the sake of conservation and complacency, right? This was back when Tweedy was arguably still at an age when “acting out” was a viable option, but no one’s kidding themselves now that the six-piece have reached middle age, and maybe that’s what’s given them that newfound clout. It helps that, as the music listening world finally got to know the once-enigmatic frontman via last year’s excellent autobiography and twin solo albums, we learned how he’s embraced that role with pride and clarity, reckoning with his disparate legacies and unabashedly valuing his family over everything. Yet that voice remains crucially checked, wrapped up in sardonic turns of phrase and indulgent, inscrutable imagery. Knowing how he and the band operates means knowing not to a take an album title like Ode To Joy at face-value, especially when paired with equally circumventing cover art. There’s nothing more American than promising the pursuit of happiness, but there’s also nothing more American than realizing the emptiness of that promise, or at least the realization that pursuit doesn’t come for free.

Ode To Joy certainly doesn’t sound like its namesake on the surface. For most of its runtime it’s a stark record, built from closely-recorded acoustic instruments and lightly soaked in experimental ambience that recalls both the wide spaces of A Ghost Is Born and (perhaps unfortunately?) Jay Farrar’s avant-garde touches on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. That record brought the band’s cerebral take on dusty alt-country to a deeply visceral level, and it’s hard to listen to tracks like “Quiet Amplifier” and “Before Us” and not be reminded of past treasures like “Radio Cure” or “Ashes of American Flags.” This is obviously a different band from back then, but it’s the closest this lineup has come yet to mirroring the peculiar Dust Bowl overcast that Foxtrot captured so well, minus its sense of reckless abandon. This is not to say the record is a total downer, but the “joy” that’s expressed here is less trite than hard-earned, the product of reserved expectations that’s reflected in overall subdued performances.

From start to delicate finish, Ode To Joy rarely rises beyond a controlled din. When it does, like on the lifting “Love Is Everywhere (Beware),” the contrast is immediately noticeable and subtly supplemental. The album does a lot with those moments of increased action, but its true strength lies in its undercurrent of restraint and how lively it sounds without reaching or decibels or tempo rushes. “Everyone Hides” is comfortable to lay down a catchy palm-muted melody and run with it; “White Wooden Cross” is just as undemanding, but includes a simple crescendoing banjo strum that adds to the song’s emotional lucidity. “Quiet Amplifier,” meanwhile, builds patiently from a steady pulse into a dissonant clanging roar, but unlike A Ghost Is Born’s “Less Than You Think” it doesn’t outstay its welcome, cutting off almost too suddenly. Situationally the record’s overall lack of energy works to its detriment when the melodies aren’t there to compensate, as on the dragging “We Were Lucky” or the jaunty “Hold Me Anyway,” but there are inspired moments even in those songs that keep them from being total duds. On the whole, Ode To Joy is perhaps the most consistently solid record Wilco’s put out in a while, and that’s a wonder for any band with decades of history.

Tweedy remains as brilliant a lyricist as always, providing profundity in economy. His signature inscrutability, much like the late David Berman’s witticisms, have been legendarily tied to his depressive disposition, times when communication disintegrates as the brain is anchored by darkness. Here it’s no different, perhaps even stronger than it’s ever been. Take “Bright Leaves,” the album’s shuffling opener, and how it deftly captures the history of an aged relationship, complete with all the accompanying struggle and compromise. In naturalistic imagery (“Bright leaves…beneath the old snow/set free by the winter rain”) Tweedy keeps the content ambiguous but the sentiment crystal-clear: they may change with the seasons, but the love never stops, and that’s something to be thankful for (it helps that the slow-paced arrangement supports both uplifting and downcast interpretations). Elsewhere, he lends a freshness to old aphorisms (“There is no mother like pain”), confronts the call of the void (“A thought appeared like a morning dew/And my blood ran cold”) and, on “Love Is Everywhere,” writes a clarion call for collective bravery in the face of outrage and fear. His gentle touch helps pull Ode To Joy out of the morass and into something worthy of its title. After all, it might be overworked and buzzwordy to mention, but America is quickly becoming a land of depressives, and Tweedy’s directed his art in a way that’s long been able to level with the negative parts of our hearts. In Ode To Joy, he and his bandmates make their best efforts to understand why we naturally descend into cynicism and to pull us out, if only briefly, into the brisk breeze of hope.

Recommended for staring up at all those skyscrapers.