Roll over, Beethoven
Jeff Tweedy and co reconvene for an album that marks Wilco’s 25th anniversary. By Sylvie Simmons.
Wilco ★★★★ Ode To Joy DBPM. CD/DL/LP
AFTER 2016’S Schmilco, Wilco took a twoand-a-half-year break. Nothing sinister. When drummer Glenn Kotche’s wife won a scholarship that entailed moving to Finland for a while, it seemed a good time for everyone to do their own stuff. Jeff Tweedy, no slacker, kept more than busy. In 2017 he released Together At Last, a solo acoustic remake of songs he wrote for Wilco, Loose Fur and the glorious Golden Smog. In 2018 there was Warm, solo acoustic again but with new songs, a ruminative musical companion to the autobiography published the same year, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back). Then, earlier this year, Warmer, a solo album as humble and spare as its predecessor.
You might think that after reaching 50, the Belleville, Illinois boy who became a reluctant alt-country god, whose musical ambition and curiosity would stretch the already vast parameters of Americana way beyond the back porch, might be tempted to step back from the whole Wilco mythology in favour of quiet, folky, intimate solo meditations. But he missed his band. Hence their eleventh album, Ode To Joy.
It’s hard to pick a more grandiose musical work to name a Wilco album after; the Beethoven piece that, coincidentally, has been in the news this year after Brexit Party MEPs turned their backs on it. Or maybe not so coincidental. Tweedy says the title is “sincere”“The record is, in a weird way, an ode; this terrible stuff is happening, this deepening sense of creeping authoritarianism that weighs on everybody’s psyche on a daily basis, and you’re allowed to feel a lot of things at once. And one thing that is worth feeling [and] fighting for, is your freedom to still have joy, even though things are going to shit.”
Compared to Ludwig Van’s, this is a sparse, minimalist ode to joy. There’s a disturbing, jackboot feel to the drums that dominate opener, Bright Leaves. Tweedy’s vocal, in contrast, sounds delicate and vulnerable, but with warmth and even a touch of glory. Militaristic drums dominate many of the songs, with quieter musical nuance from the rest of the band, and an out-there electric guitar solo on We Were Lucky. That song’s a beauty; so are Love Is Everywhere (Beware), the oddly joyous Hold Me Anyway, and An Empty Corner, with hushed piano and steel.
Tweedy’s description of the album as, “These monolithic, brutal structures that these delicate feelings are hung on,” might equally apply to how life feels for many of us in the UK and US. It’s interesting how Tweedy’s soft, kind voice and his bittersweet poetry aren’t silenced by the heartless drums – or maybe they’re really just another kind of heartbeat. Tweedy told MOJO, “We wanted to make really really small music gigantic.” They did.