WILCO – The Whole Love (Part 4)

“MOR meh.” Not Brandon’s most articulate phrase, but one we’re sticking with, apparently. Brandon goes to great lengths to refute the charges that he A.) needs to listen more carefully and B.) needs to spend more time with the album. To paraphrase: Spending more time with boring people doesn’t always or even often make them less boring. “People,” here, being a metaphor for music, obv.

Wilco – “Art of Almost” (Live on Letterman)

From: Brandon Hall
To: Chris Mollica

“’MOR meh’ I assume it to be?” MOR meh I know it to be. MOR meh it is. Aside from a couple songs, this album is pure middle of the road, blasé, play it in the waiting room of the dentist’s office because no one will give a shit, 401K, buy yourself a pair of Keds, peanut butter and jelly, apple pie, Ford Taurus meh.

Art? What is art? “Art” as a label is subjective and I’m not going to sit here and say The Whole Love isn’t art. I will say it’s not always interesting art. It’s occasionally bad art, especially when taking into account some of Tweedy’s nonsensical lyrics, which I’ll get to in a minute. But “art?” Sure. Why not? Anything can be art if you put it in a frame.

But to imply that I, someone who started and has kept up a music website for the better part of the past year, someone who takes months to make a ten-song mix, a DJ and obsessive audiophile, is guilty of not listening carefully enough or somehow lacking in patience seems specious at best – not wrong, necessarily – but suspect.*

You know what more time with this album will not do?

It will not make “Sunloathe” sound like something other than a Beatles rip-off. More listens don’t suddenly give the song the payoff it sets up with its swelling atmospheric background and chorus of “Ooohs” from the rest of the band. This song calls for a dramatic billowing coda, but instead just fades away, underwhelmingly – a running theme on this album.

More time will not get rid of that damned Monkees sounding organ that makes “I Might,” “Dawned on Me,” and “Standing O” sound derivative of “I’m a Believer” which then calls to mind fucking Smash Mouth and Shrek and now my day is pretty much ruined.

It doesn’t make “Open Mind” not sound clichéd musically, even though Tweedy sings on it, “I still say we’re too old for clichés.” Then don’t record this boring-ass song, dude.

It doesn’t make “Capitol City” not sound like a chintzy, honky-tonk ramble circa 1945 via the Atlantic City Boardwalk. You called it McCartney-esque, which I take to mean “lame.” So I agree with you there.

And one thing that time actually makes much much worse are the god-awful gibber-gabber lyrics polluting many of the albums best sounding songs. Tweedy has suggested in interviews leading up to this album’s release that many of the lyrics were derived from phonetic garble, to borrow a phrase from Pitchfork’s Paul Thompson. No shit. How else can you explain lines in “I Might” like “The Magna Carta’s on a Slim Jim blood, brother?” Where’s an O RLY owl, when you need one?

There we go.

Or take, for example, all of “Born Alone,” which you yourself called “utter nonsense” before trying to make an argument in its defense. There’s no defense for lines like, “Please come closer to the feather smooth lens fry,” or “I have married broken spoke charging smoke wheels.”

Here, allow me to pen some lyrics for Wilco’s next album:

“Porridge punk kicks carburetors from time.”

“Ultimate slay God makes shoes in ocean fires.”

“Shibble shabble scoobie doobie doo.”

You’re welcome, Mr. Tweedy.

And for the record, he’s really not throwing “sun/moon metaphors all over the place.” The celestial bodies make an occasional appearance in a casual manner, but hardly enough to be considered any kind of motif. And even if they were, it neither shows restlessness nor talented song writing. What could be easier than writing about the sun and the moon? At most, it shows a nine-year-old’s proficiency in poetry.

What’s the point, by the way, of “blurring expectations,” as you said (I would say misleading them), by opening the album with “Art of Almost?” What purpose does that serve? To make us think we’re getting an exciting, inventive album, instead of an uninspired, milquetoast one? You make the assertion as if it were some kind of coup, when all it really accomplishes is highlighting how no other song manages to rise up to that level. It actually makes the album worse by comparison.

You asked if the line in “Capitol City” where he sings “I wish you were here / I wish I was there with you,” sounds to me like the words of a “comfortable man.” To that I say it’s a line in a song, a good straightforward, albeit easy line, and doesn’t speak to Tweedy’s state of mind a fraction as much as this entire album taken as a whole. Yes, they are too comfortable. They don’t have anyone in the band or outside of it challenging them. Tweedy has few demons left to fight, within or without. And yes, it makes them boring. Bennett wasn’t a “poison,” he was a catalyst. Poison kills. Catalysts destroy inertia. Good art does need a fight. Making art is a fucking battle. If you’ve ever seen the documentary, It Might Get Loud, Jack White has a great scene where he extols the virtues of playing the shittiest guitar he can find because he believes his music is better when he has to fight for it. He is 100% right.

Jeff Tweedy and the rest of Wilco need a good fucking donnybrook. Otherwise it’s going to be MOR meh from here on out.

“I wonder why strange rhymes overpower me.”
That makes two of us,

Brandon

*[While I understand you were not making a personal attack, it’s so much more fun to take it personally. Fight to the death and all that.]

The Whole Love is out via dBpm.

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