Wilco

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Not bad, but very overrated.

Review Score:

(6/10)
I like Wilco, which is why I put off buying this CD for quite a while; anything that receives so much unrelenting praise is immediately suspect to me. Still, a friend of mine told me I needed to get this CD into my life. "I'm not really a fan of Wilco's other stuff," he said, "but this album really speaks to me. It's like, 'How do you know my life?'" So I decided it couldn't be that bad. I mean, "Summer Teeth" was good, even if the mastering was a little squashed-sounding.

Regardless of how much truth there is to the band's supposed label difficulties (and there is some evidence supporting the possibility that the whole thing was either: a] a clever ploy to hype their new album, or b] a clever way to renegotiate their contract while hyping their new album), my reaction was ultimately something akin to: "What? That's it? All the hype was over this?"

I like the first few songs, and the fact that "Radio Cure" all but buries its melody in muffled production until the song's climax. The lyrics range from strangely poetic ("I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue"--which is a great opening couplet) to banal ("The cash machine/is blue and green"; rhyming "f*ck" with "luck").

If you strip away the unusual production touches, this really isn't as eclectic an album as most would have you believe. Almost all of the songs are built around simple chord-changes and repetitive, conventional structures. What exactly is going on here that's groundbreaking? Some of the lyrics don't rhyme, but a good amount of them do. There's always a chorus around the corner, waiting to repeat itself. Jeff Tweedy's ragged voice lends some credence to the supposed "confessional" nature of these songs, but John Lennon did it better more than thirty years ago with "Plastic Ono Band". I'd be willing to bet that, if you took away the production flourishes and the label-dropping deal, there wouldn't be nearly as many reviews here as there are, and there wouldn't have been nearly as many frothing-at-the-mouth reviews from music critics who can't seem to decide whether they're cynical or as easily-won-over as a five year-old handed an ice cream cone on a hot day.

This isn't a particularly bad album and, as newer music goes, it's even pretty good. But it isn't anything all that special, and it certainly doesn't deserve all the attention it's received.

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