I’ve torn myself away from
Wimbledon to bring you this next review. The sacrifices I make for you, dear
reader, the sacrifices I make...
Disc 755 is….Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Artist: Wilco
Year of Release: 2002
What’s up with the Cover? Skyscrapers? There is not enough
going on with this cover for me to like or hate it. The background colour would
be fine if you were painting your living room, I suppose.
How I Came To Know It: I really liked “A.M” (reviewed
way back at Disc 84) and I read that “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” was their best
album, so I bought it next.
How It Stacks Up: I have four Wilco albums, not
counting Jeff Tweedy’s many other projects. Of those four albums, “Yankee Hotel
Foxtrot” is third. Sorry, Wilco fans.
Ratings: 3 stars
Highly creative and experimental bands like Wilco can
go one of two directions once they have enough money to do what they want. They
can explore new sounds while maintaining the pretty compositions that made them
great to begin with (think Beck), or they can decide to just do a bunch of
weird crap that makes them feel clever (think Radiohead). “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”
is a bit of both.
The best example of this is the first song, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” which
could have been a heart-wrenching four minute break up song, but is instead a
seven minute monstrosity. The melody once the song gets going is quite pretty,
but it is buried in strange droning, and ill-placed chimes that sound like
someone’s microwave popcorn went off during the recording session. It is a promising
song that descends into a droning puddle of self-absorption. Competing piano chords
introduced halfway seem designed to balance off against the harmony of the hook
but succeed only in making the whole thing disjointed. This song is the musical
equivalent of taking months to sculpt a beautiful statue only to have some drunkard
pee on it.
Few other songs on the album manage to be both great
and awful in equal measure, although when this album is in full Radiohead form like on the appropriately titled “Radio Cure”
it is truly maddening. It is like having some guy at a party idly noodling on
his guitar, and refusing to just play a damn song.
In other places, like on “Kamera” or “War on War” the songs are free and easy. They aren’t that exciting
on their own, but they have a nice rhythm to them that makes you want to slap
your knee and tap your foot, so points for that.
Although it takes a while to warm up, mid-way in the
band finds its groove with some fine tracks, the first and best of which is “Jesus, etc.” which captures the new atmospheric
production the band has been fumbling for, but without sacrificing the
exceptional songwriting. The chorus of this song felt like an apology for the
album’s excesses:
“Tall buildings shake
Voices escape singing sad sad
songs
Tuned to chords strung down your
cheeks
Bitter melodies turning your
orbit around.”
I love the oddly placed rhymes and reliance on
assonance in this verse that comes alive under front-man Tweedy’s unique
phrasing.
“Jesus, etc.”
launches a pretty solid run on “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” with the depressing “Ashes of American Flags,” the
light-hearted nostalgia of “Heavy Metal
Drummer” and the ‘soul music on Quaaludes’ feel of “I’m the Man Who Loves You.” These songs all have little flaws – the
first two fade into annoying sound experiments similar to the album’s opening
track and the third needs one less hit of Quaaludes, but they form a nice
grouping and have quality songwriting holding them up.
Near the end of the album, “Pot Kettle Black” and “Poor
Places” feel a lot more like the earlier Wilco sound that I prefer. “Poor Places” has a combination of
yearning and intellectual discovery that always makes me think of first-year
university. Even the odd bits of disjointed rag time piano in “Poor Places” can’t keep me from liking
this song and its too-clever lyrics like:
“There’s bourbon on the breath
Of the singer you love so much
He takes all his words from the
books
You don’t read anway.”
Rap artists borrow famous riffs to make hits, and we writers quote other writers to impress girls. I regret nothing.
The final track, “Reservations” certainly gave me some. It is another seven minute
monstrosity with a tail on it longer than a snake, and equally hard to love.
The album only has 11 songs and 51 minutes of playing time, but because of
mood-crap like “Reservations” it
still feels too long. If I wanted to listen to this kind of atmospheric
blubbering, I’d put on a tape of whale songs to help me sleep.
Based on the strong songwriting foundation of “Yankee
Hotel Foxtrot” I gave it three stars, but that is the critic in me speaking
more than the fan. The good stuff on this album is like a Tiramisu cake, sweet,
but excessively layered with a bunch of stuff that is too rich for me to enjoy. I just want
to scrape off the delicious icing and leave the rest of it for the waiter to
discover under my napkin as I’m putting on my coat.
Best
tracks: Jesus
etc., I’m the Man Who Loves You, Poor Places
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