Roots radicals
Back together in one room, songs flowing, Wilco determine to reshape country.
Wilco ★★★★ Cruel Country DBPM. CD/DL/LP
FOR ALL their love of the genre, Wilco were never really a country band – too grungy on their 1995 debut, A.M.; stretching out into ’60s Beach Boys pop and ’70s Stones-y rock on the multi-directional ’96 double Being
There. Twenty-six years later arrives their second twin-disc-length album, hot off the press after being recorded, live in the studio and with few overdubs, in the first months of 2022. But while singer Jeff Tweedy declares that with this twelfth record, for once, Wilco are “digging in and calling it country”, this is far from a rootsy, back-to-basics affair.
Since the “American Radiohead” tag was affixed to them from 2001’s masterful Yankee
Hotel Foxtrot on, as a band they’ve advanced further into and then retreated from art rock, leading to the minimal and precise sound of 2019’s Ode To Joy. This, in some part, brings us to the more trad-leaning Cruel
Country, though the exterior influences of our tense times also had an effect. Tweedy claims that since the world outside the studio was already strange, Wilco didn’t feel they wanted to be, and so returned to the comforting familiarity of folk and country forms. The deluge of 21 tracks here, meanwhile, is a product of the shared joy of the six-piece group finally being back together face-to-face in the studio.
If there’s a recurring theme, it’s one involving Tweedy’s conflicting, occasionally tortured feelings about the “dying empire” of 21st century America. The title track addresses this directly (“I love my country/Stupid and cruel”) as its clip-clop horse hooves percussion makes it come over like a weary cowboy song. In this way, Cruel Country is partly an ode to a troubled nation, part musical genre all of its own. Assessing the American psyche within the acoustic, ’64 Beatles-in-Tennessee contours of Hints, he states that “we’d rather kill than compromise”.
The Plains, meanwhile, explores modern stasis – whether induced by lockdown or laziness – and watching the vast spaces of the US continent on a TV screen, rather than getting out and exploring them. Elsewhere, the longest track here (at near eight minutes), Many Worlds, looks upwards, Tweedy drawling like a hippy stargazer, amid a swirl of spacey piano and echoing organ, finding comfort in the knowledge that he’s not the only one staring at the heavens.
Throughout, the productions veer between something akin to country traditional – the ’60s Nashville moves of Falling Apart (Right Now), the shades of Hank Williams that colour Please Be Wrong – and far weirder atmospheres. The latter reach their twin peaks with the slurred vocal oddness of The Empty Condor and the band collapsing into messy arpeggios in parts of Tonight’s The Day.
Wilco have been on a long, strange trip as an art rock band, and so they return forever changed to confidently shape a form of country music that is entirely of their own character. Maybe they couldn’t even make a straight roots record if they tried, as underlined by the title of one track, Country Song Upside Down. As Tweedy puts it here in breezy strummer All Across The World: “I’ve seen too much”.