An egg--quaintly simple, pleasantly symmetrical. A small crack appears. Suddenly it is broken in two, a hollow inside exposed. Then gone, as if it were never there to begin with.
A Ghost is Born.
The cover art of Wilco's fifth album, the follow-up to their genre-bending masterwork, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, is quietly telling. Incorporated into every song is something familiar but fresh, elegant yet nondescript. Wilco, however, is content to take these soft melodies and crack them in half with dissonant guitar solos and syncopated riffs until they have almost disintegrated completely.
This really is the essence of the album. Jeff Tweedy's vocals are distant, the bewildered and overwhelmed voice described on the track "Hummingbird:" "the type of sound that floats around / and then back down like a feather / but in the deep chrome canyons of the loudest Manhattans / no one could hear him."
Tweedy's melodies get lost in layers of distortion and feedback like the identity-less city-dweller, the forgotten lover, the migraine-ridden conscience. The center cannot hold; only a hollow shell remains.
Ghosts dominate the album. "The Late Greats" tells of bands that never played and the greatest tracks that were never heard.
The narrator in "Theologians" longs to be understood, but in the end proclaims, "I am a notion / I am all emotion / I am a cherry ghost."
In "Hummingbird," Tweedy begs to be remembered, "standing still in your past/ floating fast like a hummingbird."
In "Less Than You Think," the band abandons the song altogether--the sound of the group disintegrating, leaving their guitars next to amplifiers in a feedback freefall. The world moves on mechanically without them; it leaves them behind.
But within the noise and disarray there is brilliance -- catchy hooks, stunning instrumentals, and the pop experimentalism that made YHF an instant classic. The dissonant chaos makes Tweedy's voice warmer; his whisper brings you closer, alongside him in his noisy world. The result is a wonderful, thought-provoking album that seems to offer more and more with every listen.
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