Album Reviews

Wilco’s eigth album opens with the eccentric “Art Of Almost”, seven minutes of guitars battling some electronic bleeps before deranging into a psychedelic jam session. Hello world, they’re back! It shows a band feeling very comfortable with where they are in their career and listening to “The Whole Love”, you can just see the band smiling in the studio. Well, maybe it’s more of a fleeting smile or maybe even just a baring of the teeth mistaken for a smile… lines such as ‘You won't set the kids on fire, but I might’ will have that effect on people.

After that first cut though, this becomes a conventional, somewhat formulaic Wilco album. Some of the tracks will probably remind you of older Wilco songs, a couple more slip by almost unnoticed. But hey, even a conventional Wilco album sounds pretty friggin’ good compared to some of the other crap we got shoved down our throats on a daily basis. And with songs like “Dawned On Me” and “Open Mind” or the 12-minutes-long pop symphony that is closer “One Sunday Morning”, they did write a couple of instant Wilco classics… so yeah, not their best album but still a damn good addition to their discography.