it's been raining for days and my Wilco binge continues to feel appropriate. April is the cruelest month, after all.
as an addendum, Summerteeth hasn't left my car in weeks. I just keep going back. I fucking love that album so hard. Still.
Mermaid Avenue Vol II sounds like what it is: leftovers from the first album. It's fine. But I mean, as something that sits between two of their finest albums ever it's a bit underwhelming. My favorite tracks are "Someday Some Morning Sometime" which I'm pretty sure is just Jeff and Jay; and "I Was Born" with its Natalie Merchant vocal. So... it's not so much I am into the full on collaborations of the album as a whole. It's good as I said - but tough to live up to the expectations of every Wilco album before it.
Okay, so most Wilco albums are ones I say are "maybe my favorite," but Yanhee Hotel Foxtrot is "probably my favorite" as trite as that may sound. I vividly remember buying the album the day it was released (along w/ Tweedy's Chelsea Walls soundtrack) and listening to it on my ride home through a bright Spring ride through the country back roads. "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart" totally floored me. It remains possibly my favorite Wilco song ever (still trite) and is in my opinion one of the finest guitar songs of the 2000's. That song ended and I had to start the album over before I could continue. YHF is important to so many people. No doubt. To me it serves as part of a soundtrack to that immediate post 9/11 era. This, Murray Street and Ryan Adam's Gold all remind me of this time. And I don't mean this in a political way at all. I'm just talking about that moment in time. When things seemed really weird and these albums... they just sounded so grounded to me. Special albums. At that time I frequented this bar, and all the other regulars were also frequent performers (as I was at the time) and YHF was this weird album we all loved and played over the PA before/between/after sets. I don't know. It has a magical sound to it. "Jesus, etc" and "I'm The Man Who Loves You" and "Heavy Metal Drummer" and everything. I love this album so much.
The one that Sev's been waiting for. Well guess what? A Ghost Is Born is fantastic. It's like... after YHF they didn't quite know if they should go further with that sound or go off the deep end in another direction. They managed to do both. The cliche "America's Radiohead" thing feels apt here. I don't know. I'm rambling. This album feels so rootsy and classic Wilco while also doing crazy shit like "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" or "Less Than You Think" while balancing it with shit like "Late Greats" or "Company In My Back." Love it and still don't know how to properly describe it. It's like the most Wilco album while also being the most experimental Wilco album.
Fuck me. THIS is how you make a live album. Just wow. So you take the bulk of your latest album (Ghost Is Born) and then mesh it with your full history. And I don't just mean singles. I mean deep cuts. I mean rarities. The band full embraces their discography on this album. They open with "Misunderstood" and just knock this shit out of the park. And then they proceed to just kill it with Ghost Is Born stuff and pepper it with stuff like "One By One" or the title track or "Via Chicago" and whatever else. As much as I just raved about Ghost, truthfully I might reach for this more often. I don't know. It's got this great purity to it. To go back to the Radiohead analogy it's like how I truly think of I Might Be Wrong as an album on its own rather than just live versions of Kid A/Amnesiac. Kicking Television is just really really great on its own. It's not just a live Wilco album - it is a totally great Wilco album.