Boards
Wilco - A Ghost Is Born
What does everyone think about this, since I haven't seen much written about it here? Seeing no-one reviewed it, thought I'd do one myself :)
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Hot, lazy, dry days and sudden summer downpours. Oppressive, meandering, headache-ridden afternoons. Dusty drives down chaotic potholed freeways. These are the soundscapes that A Ghost Is Born’s quiet gravity pulls you into, so slowly and subtly that you can hardly feel yourself moving. This isn’t the supersonically momentous pop record that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was, or the tense collision of sweetness and weirdness that characterised Summerteeth, though it undoubtedly contains connections with both. Instead it’s an altogether more organic and indeed complex album which is almost never instantly satisfying, but almost always rewarding of intense listening.
The album opens with At Least That’s What You Said, which starts its life as a piano ballad so soft that it’s smothered by any background noise, and develops into a series of fluid and electrifying guitar solos of the sort that you’ve never heard before from Wilco. It conveys a sense of crushing sadness and hopelessness that’s echoed in many places on the record. Hell Is Chrome follows, and it’s one of the album’s strongest pieces. It ostensibly describes meeting the devil, but is infiltrated with such quiet dignity and poignancy that it seems to deal with something much less frivolous, much greater, much more transcendent. The guitar here is used to awesome effect, as indeed it is in many places on the album, and the mournful one-note solos are truly emotive, recalling the similar solo in the Pixies’ Hey.
The song also contains my favourite lyrical fragment on the album (“The air was crisp like sunny late winter days; springtime yawning high in the haze”). On initial hearing, A Ghost Is Born’s lyrics don’t appear to be as expansively, all-encompassingly emotional or poignant as some of Foxtrot’s finest moments such as Jesus Etc or Ashes Of American Flags. However, with subsequent hearings, tiny moments and lines start to jump out of the mix and take on unexpected meanings; imagery that you never noticed, or which just seemed obscure and dry at first, becomes real and tangible. Hummingbird describes a man lying underneath “the great fountain spray of the great Milky Way”, suggesting that those stars “would never let him die alone”. Amid the depression and gloom, Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics keep offering moments of hope, humanity and redemption which lifts Wilco’s music onto an entirely different emotional plane.
Musically, it’s a very strong album which gradually reveals itself to contain tunes as strong as any the band have ever written. Muzzle Of Bees’ light, breezy acoustic guitars create a soft summery atmosphere very much at odds with the relentless throb of the previous track, Spiders (Kidsmoke). Hummingbird is a beautiful pop song with a delightful musical twist at the end. The entropic Handshake Drugs is quite reminiscent of A Shot In The Arm, as an immensely catchy melody is paired with dark, contradictory lyrics dealing with Tweedy’s prescription drug addiction. Just as was the case in the Summerteeth song, the tune is gradually overtaken by noise and static until all that remains of the melody is the undulating, captivating bassline. Typically for the album, a song which seemed innocuous on first listen turns out to be one of the most interesting and most startling tracks on the album.
Wishful Thinking and Company In My Back are both quietly gorgeous songs, revealing their lush secrets more with every play. I’m A Wheel follows, a song which has taken much criticism but which is pretty enjoyable when viewed as a sweetly vapid romp, a rare light moment in an emotionally tortured, migraine-ridden album. Theologians, too, is an impressive song, a piano-led pop song which contains some of Tweedy’s most conventionally pretty lyrics. There’s a line in this song which runs, according to the lyric booklet, “I’m an ocean, and this emotion, slow motion,” but I always think it sounds more like “I’m an ocean, an abyss in motion, slow motion.” ‘An abyss in motion’ suggests an undertow of sadness that is always changing, never constant, and I think that would describe this album quite fittingly.
I only have two problem tracks with this album, and it’s probably the two that most people have a problem with. Spiders (Kidsmoke) would be a far better song if it went on for half the time, and Less Than You Think gains nothing from the abrasive twelve minutes of noise at the end. In the latter song, however, with one press of the skip button, what remains is probably the most poignant song of the year. A cryptic, haunted lyric is set to an almost unbearably pretty melody, and what is described in the CD booklet as ‘a hammered dulcimer’ adds an emotional brittleness that makes it sound like the song could disintegrate at any moment. “Your spine starts to shine, and you shiver at your soul,” Tweedy half-sings, half-whispers, and it just suggests a person at breaking point who can’t take much more of themselves. It’s a feeling I wouldn’t want to experience, and that’s why it makes me shiver.
The album closes out with the bright The Late Greats, which has the feeling of a bonus track but doesn’t break the atmosphere of the album. It’s an atmosphere that makes A Ghost Is Born a thrillingly challenging and rewarding follow-up to the album that no-one thought could be satisfactorily followed. Whether this is better than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is not the issue (for what it’s worth, I consider YHF marginally superior). The point is that Wilco have produced another album that lives up to their growing legacy, and that it will keep fans talking for a long time.
--------------
Hot, lazy, dry days and sudden summer downpours. Oppressive, meandering, headache-ridden afternoons. Dusty drives down chaotic potholed freeways. These are the soundscapes that A Ghost Is Born’s quiet gravity pulls you into, so slowly and subtly that you can hardly feel yourself moving. This isn’t the supersonically momentous pop record that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was, or the tense collision of sweetness and weirdness that characterised Summerteeth, though it undoubtedly contains connections with both. Instead it’s an altogether more organic and indeed complex album which is almost never instantly satisfying, but almost always rewarding of intense listening.
The album opens with At Least That’s What You Said, which starts its life as a piano ballad so soft that it’s smothered by any background noise, and develops into a series of fluid and electrifying guitar solos of the sort that you’ve never heard before from Wilco. It conveys a sense of crushing sadness and hopelessness that’s echoed in many places on the record. Hell Is Chrome follows, and it’s one of the album’s strongest pieces. It ostensibly describes meeting the devil, but is infiltrated with such quiet dignity and poignancy that it seems to deal with something much less frivolous, much greater, much more transcendent. The guitar here is used to awesome effect, as indeed it is in many places on the album, and the mournful one-note solos are truly emotive, recalling the similar solo in the Pixies’ Hey.
The song also contains my favourite lyrical fragment on the album (“The air was crisp like sunny late winter days; springtime yawning high in the haze”). On initial hearing, A Ghost Is Born’s lyrics don’t appear to be as expansively, all-encompassingly emotional or poignant as some of Foxtrot’s finest moments such as Jesus Etc or Ashes Of American Flags. However, with subsequent hearings, tiny moments and lines start to jump out of the mix and take on unexpected meanings; imagery that you never noticed, or which just seemed obscure and dry at first, becomes real and tangible. Hummingbird describes a man lying underneath “the great fountain spray of the great Milky Way”, suggesting that those stars “would never let him die alone”. Amid the depression and gloom, Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics keep offering moments of hope, humanity and redemption which lifts Wilco’s music onto an entirely different emotional plane.
Musically, it’s a very strong album which gradually reveals itself to contain tunes as strong as any the band have ever written. Muzzle Of Bees’ light, breezy acoustic guitars create a soft summery atmosphere very much at odds with the relentless throb of the previous track, Spiders (Kidsmoke). Hummingbird is a beautiful pop song with a delightful musical twist at the end. The entropic Handshake Drugs is quite reminiscent of A Shot In The Arm, as an immensely catchy melody is paired with dark, contradictory lyrics dealing with Tweedy’s prescription drug addiction. Just as was the case in the Summerteeth song, the tune is gradually overtaken by noise and static until all that remains of the melody is the undulating, captivating bassline. Typically for the album, a song which seemed innocuous on first listen turns out to be one of the most interesting and most startling tracks on the album.
Wishful Thinking and Company In My Back are both quietly gorgeous songs, revealing their lush secrets more with every play. I’m A Wheel follows, a song which has taken much criticism but which is pretty enjoyable when viewed as a sweetly vapid romp, a rare light moment in an emotionally tortured, migraine-ridden album. Theologians, too, is an impressive song, a piano-led pop song which contains some of Tweedy’s most conventionally pretty lyrics. There’s a line in this song which runs, according to the lyric booklet, “I’m an ocean, and this emotion, slow motion,” but I always think it sounds more like “I’m an ocean, an abyss in motion, slow motion.” ‘An abyss in motion’ suggests an undertow of sadness that is always changing, never constant, and I think that would describe this album quite fittingly.
I only have two problem tracks with this album, and it’s probably the two that most people have a problem with. Spiders (Kidsmoke) would be a far better song if it went on for half the time, and Less Than You Think gains nothing from the abrasive twelve minutes of noise at the end. In the latter song, however, with one press of the skip button, what remains is probably the most poignant song of the year. A cryptic, haunted lyric is set to an almost unbearably pretty melody, and what is described in the CD booklet as ‘a hammered dulcimer’ adds an emotional brittleness that makes it sound like the song could disintegrate at any moment. “Your spine starts to shine, and you shiver at your soul,” Tweedy half-sings, half-whispers, and it just suggests a person at breaking point who can’t take much more of themselves. It’s a feeling I wouldn’t want to experience, and that’s why it makes me shiver.
The album closes out with the bright The Late Greats, which has the feeling of a bonus track but doesn’t break the atmosphere of the album. It’s an atmosphere that makes A Ghost Is Born a thrillingly challenging and rewarding follow-up to the album that no-one thought could be satisfactorily followed. Whether this is better than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is not the issue (for what it’s worth, I consider YHF marginally superior). The point is that Wilco have produced another album that lives up to their growing legacy, and that it will keep fans talking for a long time.