Chris Mollica doesn’t talk about this in his dialectics, but he sees these discussions as battles to the death. He sends little violent text messages saying things like, “I’m coming for your throat.” I want you to know this because we should hold him to it. He kicks off this round by declaring his love for Jeff Tweedy’s intelligence and Wilco’s eighth album, The Whole Love. Brandon, on the other hand, defends his own intelligence in the most arrogant fashion possible and calls The Whole Love “country rock on Prozac.”
Wilco – “The Art of Almost”
From: Chris Mollica
To: Brandon Hall
Brandon,
Jeff Tweedy is smarter than us. I just want to get that out of the way. He’s smarter than us and I love him for it. This man argues for track order. This is a man that put a song on an album knowing that most of its listeners would choose to skip it (That album won a Grammy by the way. I don’t really know what that speaks to, but that’s an entirely separate conversation). Those first few seconds of The Whole Love, the eighth studio album from American rock troubadours Wilco, sets you up to think something very weird is about to happen. Undoubtably, Wilco fans will have a gut reaction. “Foxtrot,” they’ll whisper softly, lovingly under their breaths. Jeff Tweedy knows this. From his castle in the skies, Jeff Tweedy keeps his finger on the pulse of perception, musical invention and sincerity.
Whew. That felt good.
Having said that, I hated Wilco’s last album, Wilco (The Album), which contained Wilco (The Song). See what it made me do? Not that I don’t enjoy Wilco (The Album). Yeah, I listened to it the other day and enjoyed the crap out of it, but it knew I would. It was the Wilco sound all wrapped around lovely little love songs and notes of isolation. But it never connected, just amused and teased and was smarter than me. For me, Jeff Tweedy is best when I feel like the song and music is an extension of himself. It knows what we think we’re going to hear, spins it around so we don’t know where it’s coming from and then strikes us right in the gut. I look at Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Sky Blue Sky for those kind of songs. So what if I told you Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Sky Blue Sky walked into a dark alley…and became friends? The Whole Love is heavy, dense and not as easily accessible as some of Wilco’s past catalogue, but it promises so much more. This is a man, more than forty years in, family, success and turbulent past, trying to reconcile that his will not be an easy definition.
Brandon, I like this album. Heck, I love it. There’s a ton I want to talk about, dissect, celebrate, but I’ll toss it your way. Honestly, I’m not sure where you stand on the World o’ Tweedy, so I’m dying to know what you thought. What stands out to you? Do you feel that Tweedy can do everything better than those little upstarts Girls? Are you just going to tell me to listen to a different album?
“Maybe you noticed I’m unashamed of anything that I’ve done.”
Chris
From: Brandon Hall
To: Chris Mollica
No, I’m not going to tell you to listen to a different album. At least not yet. At least not a Wilco album. You’re going to have to be the resident Wilco expert in this dialectic. I worked out a lot of sports metaphors for discussing Wilco and The Whole Love in particular, but since you’re not much of a sports guy, I realized such allusions would fall on deaf ears. However, you do know who Michael Jordan is, yes? He was kind of hard to miss in the 90s. I grew up a Chicago Bulls fan, or so I thought. But after Jordan and Pippen stopped playing for them, I kind of stopped caring about the team. See, I wasn’t a Bulls fan, I was a Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen fan. Similarly, when David Ruffin left the Temptations, I stopped caring about the Temptations. (Just kidding! I was still a long way from being born in 1968.) However, when Jay Bennett left Wilco, I stopped getting any fulfillment from them. I wouldn’t exactly call myself a Jay Bennett fan, but I am absolutely a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fan. As for Wilco, well, a certain lineup under that moniker made Foxtrot, and that lineup no longer exists. In fact, The Whole Love is the third album recorded with the same members since Sky Blue Sky – the longest such stretch for the band named Wilco, but the team colors just don’t do it for me anymore. I doubt that I would like Jay Bennett without Jeff Tweedy, but I’m not that excited about Jeff Tweedy without Jay Bennett, I’ll tell you that.
Also, I take offense to the assertion that Jeff Tweedy is smarter than me. Speak for yourself! I can’t write a catchy song to save my life but I bet I could muse circles around him on the CERN Hadron Collider, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or the rules and strictures of Eschaton as perpetrated at the Enfield Tennis Academy.
Which song and which Grammy-winning album are you speaking of? Also – all musicians argue for track order! Sequencing is important as shit. You don’t put your mixes together all haphazardly, either.
Honestly, I think this album is guilty of false advertising. That glitchy whir that kicks off album opener and standout, “Art of Almost” writes checks that are never cashed for a return to boundary-pushing experimental alt-country rock Yankee Hotel Foxtrot glory. That song is awesome, with each of the band members struggling for air in a collapsed and suffocating box – their practice loft, specifically. The song is dangerous and ominous, it clatters beneath Tweedy’s liquid melody and the stunningly well-textured billowing strings. That song kicks 40 monkey asses. 40!
The rest of the album, on the other hand, with a few exceptions, is like country rock on Prozac. No highs. No lows. No real, visceral emotion; certainly none of the cutting cruelty or heartbreak that was so prevalent in early Wilco. Just pure MOR meh. I wouldn’t say this band is bored, but they certainly seem too damn comfortable. And I understand that comfort is an amazingly valuable luxury that all humans should seek, but it makes for shitty art, truth be told. Tweedy hated Bennett and probably vice versa. The documentary about the making of Foxtrot, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, is an amazing movie and highlights the poisonous and fatal chasm between the two, but goddamn, weren’t they able to create something great?
So now Tweedy’s comfortable. His band has a solid lineup. Everyone gets along. He’s clean and sober. That’s swell. The result is a song like “Dawned on Me” which sounds for all the world like a Monkees track. Or maybe the Brady Bunch. I can’t listen to it without envisioning all the Wilco boys on stage in bright polyester suits grinning ear to ear while stepping out their little coordinated dance moves.
I will say, though, that the album does end with another show stopper, though not at all in the way it started. The twelve-minute “One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)” is so simple and subdued that you wouldn’t think it could or should last much longer than three minutes, but in all honesty, if it were twenty-four minutes, I wouldn’t complain. I can’t think of a better testament to the confidence and prowess of this band than the fact that they can turn such a little, understated folksy number into such a gripping, beautiful epic that never tires and never grows stale. It does what only the best Wilco songs have ever done – it’s honest, straight-forward, and expansive; it sneaks up on you when you’re not looking and tries to break your heart.
So, tell me Chris. Aside from the bookends, why should I like this album? What are you hearing that I’m not?
“Oh, you won’t set the kids on fire. Oh, then I might,”
Brandon
The Whole Love is out via dBpm.
Get it at:
Insound Vinyl | eMusic | Amazon MP3 & CD
AudioVole 
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