Wilco

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Quiet giants...

Review Score:

(10/10)
Wilco never seems to falter. With every album they never cease to amaze my ears with intelligent, thoughtful lyrics and unusual melodies. Their sound is not only innovative, but it is also refreshing as well. Each song feels as if it is a cocktail of folk, rock, country, and alternative influences mixed with unique and sometimes offbeat background sound samples. "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" delivers the essential Tweedy magic we all know and love, but also elaborates on it.

Before I listened to this record, I thought that "Summerteeth" was my favorite Wilco album. Now...I'm confused and not so sure. "YHF" has quickly caught up with it. The standout song for me is "Ashes of American Flags." It is one of the more openly plaintively mellow tracks on the album, and I believe that is has a few of the best lines on the whole disc--"All my lies are always wishes/I know I would die if I could come back new", as one example. Also, "Jesus, Etc." is an excellent song--the instrumentals alone are exquisite, unexpected, and most certainly unique.

Probably my favorite thing about Wilco is Jeff Tweedy's incredible way of putting emotion into lyrics that are smart in ways unlike many other artists out there. The metaphors and mental images his words evoke are breaths of fresh modern air.

Where most bands from this generation continue to churn out dated shots at greatness, Wilco's albums have no timeline. Every album sounds as perfect as it did when released. Other bands seem to try to hard to be brilliant (if they even try). With Wilco, poetic statements in song just seem to flow naturally in cohesion with each other. I think that their albums are filled with music to live by or with or in that cannot be just merely "listened" to. They become a soundtrack to life, an extension of everyone's experience. Most songs of today don't even aspire to be so much.

I may be a little overzealous with my analyzation, but such excitement is warranted with this record.

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