The infectious twang and pop hooks of Wilco's former efforts may be fading fast, but A Ghost Is Born is still a rewarding effort that demands repeated listening. The group's fifth album extends upon the experimentalism of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot with angular, blues-soaked guitar riffs ("At Least That's What You Said," "Hell Is Chrome"), a handful of sparse, yet catchy tunes (smack dab in the middle of the disc) that will surely keep college radio stations smiling, and a lengthy track that descends into mere static ("Less Than You Think"). Frontman Jeff Tweedy's songwriting continues to evolve: "Hummingbird" is a dreamy Randy Newman-styled love song; "The Late Greats" is a sly ode to the world of pop tacked onto the end of the album (as if using such a fun song on this understated disc was an afterthought). Meanwhile, producer extraordinaire Jim O'Rourke manages to make the most complicated arrangements here sound minimalist and laid-back. All told, it's another great addition to the Wilco canon. --Jason Verlinde
Wilco
A Ghost Is Born
[Nonesuch; 2004]
Rating: 6.6
At the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's non-traditional 2001 "release," I was in the midst of a two-year exile away from the home city I share with the band. While the rock-crit throngs lined up to praise the album's experimentalism, screw-the-Record-Company-Man martyrdom and accidental 9/11 relevance, it merely seemed to me like a postcard photograph that perfectly sums up all the things you love about a city, a sonic map of Chicago's every contour. Putting YHF on the stereo was all it took to cue up a mental slideshow of the city's palette: "Reservations" the gray tones of a frozen-over Lake Michigan, "Heavy Metal Drummer" the humid orange of a Grant Park festival, and "Radio Cure" the brown shade of El-track alleys.
It's very possible, then, that the underwhelming feeling projected by A Ghost Is Born is linked to my address being restored to a Chicago zip code, where I have the city's essence accessible right outside my courtyard gate. Early returns on the album veer wildly from rapturous proclamations that this record solidifies the band's genius to cred-snipers who see it as a crippling failure. To me, it sounds like neither extreme, but rather like a band in need of a break, a band that's been reading their press, a band straying too far from their strengths, and a band that's still too good to let any of these things completely obscure their talents.
A lot of those assumptions are based on the simple fact that A Ghost Is Born is a wildly uneven album, fluctuating in both mood and quality over the course of its one hour runtime. Less cohesive than any other Wilco release, Ghost fulfills all the stereotypes of the album-after-the-breakthrough: So you've played the band reinvention card, what next? On some songs, the band take refuge in their past incarnations ("I'm a Wheel", "Hummingbird"), on some they dip their toe in the water of other bands' pools ("Spiders/Kidsmoke"), and on others they take the previous album's achievements to uncomfortable extremes ("Less Than You Think").
But more than anything, Jeff Tweedy confirms the fear I've held since I was exposed to most of this new material last year during Wilco's tour-closing show: He now revels in extended guitar solos. Five of Ghost's first six songs dissolve into noisy fretboard fingerings, and it's no coincidence that this first half of the album is where most of the weaknesses lie. As a Neil Young fan, I'm no anti-soloist, but for an artist as lyrically and vocally gifted as Tweedy to resort to expressing emotions through age-old bombast and pyrotechnics, something must be gumming up the songwriting works.
Three of these shut-up-and-play guitar sections come in songs so sleepy and hazy ("At Least That's What You Said", "Muzzle of Bees", "Hell Is Chrome") that they practically invite idle speculation about Tweedy's prehab pill regimen. Sluggish and flat, they're the opposite of the idea-packed YHF material, with the affected quirks that fill out the arrangements unable to dispel the overall grogginess.
"Spiders/Kidsmoke", on the other hand, dabbles in a marathon Krautrock vamp, spoiling one of Wilco's best new songs with a cyclical arrangement that erases the tension and release of its live arrangement. Where "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" spent its lengthy runtime constantly shapeshifting, "Spiders/Kidsmoke" seems to content to simply spins its wheels for upwards of 10 minutes.
Only "Hummingbird" manages to cut through Side A's gloom, revisiting the Beatles-pop of Summerteeth, albeit without that album's hyperactive keyboards. Many of A Ghost Is Born's brighter spots seem to be spin-offs of Summerteeth"s classic rock obsession rather than blippy YHF explorations-- despite this being Wilco's first release since the departure of canon-worship keyboardist Jay Bennett. Remaining within the safe confines of their more traditional influences, the piano-strut of "Theologians" echoes the white-soul of The Band (Wilco's closest ancestral analogue), while the slapdash "I'm a Wheel" is an encore-ready reminder of the group's early, 'Mats-evoking days.
There are only two songs on A Ghost Is Born that supercede Wilco's influences and arrangement struggles, moments when studio texture and songwriting merge smoothly to represent the album's grey mood in a way that's genuinely moving rather than disappointingly motionless. Whereas the ambient storm that drifts over the entire album can be distracting, on "Wishful Thinking" it creates just the right overcast backdrop, guiding Tweedy's softly cracking voice as he combs through feedback blankets looking for love's tunnel-end light. Grandiose yet mellow, "Company in My Back" makes the best use of Wilco's current keyboard-heavy lineup as piano and Casio verse-color exploding into dulcimer cacophony on the chorus.
Nevertheless, A Ghost Is Born squanders its second-half capital in the final reel, whipping up an impenetrable, unnecessary 10-minute noise squall to conclude the thin-ice beauty of "Less Than You Think". In interviews, Tweedy has explained the segment as a aural replica of the migraines that propelled him towards pharmaceuticals, but even the deepest empathy won't prevent its unrewarding drone from propelling listeners towards the ">>" button. Hit it, and you're treated to the forgettable "Late Greats", rock-by-numbers with lyrics that unfortunately seem to indicate Tweedy's complaisance with the obscurity = good, radio = bad logic of his loudest booster-critics.
In the end, the ambitious misfires and pre-coffee drowsiness of A Ghost Is Born don't ruin the album entirely-- they only serve as distractions that make it much more difficult to excavate the band's strengths from the surrounding detritus. Certain islands of success continue to give me that feeling of purified Chicagoness, even as I spend my days commuting through the actual city. Should my daily premonition of the CTA's silver snake surging off its elevated track come true, I can't think of a more fitting score for my mass transit demise than "Company in My Back". But it pains me to see Wilco celebrate this album by getting right back on the tour bus, outfitted with a new guitar-army lineup, and spending yet more time away from the city from whence they derive their power. Won't you come home (and stay home), Jeff Tweedy?
-Rob Mitchum, June 22nd, 2004
Review by Mark Deming
It's hard not to wonder if Wilco's breakthrough 2002 release, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, would have been such a critical success and so eagerly embraced by the indie rock community if it hadn't become such a cause celebre thanks to the band being unceremoniously dropped by Reprise Records, and then signed by Nonesuch after the album had become a hot item on the Internet. Much of the critical reaction to the album, while almost uniformly enthusiastic (and rightly so), had an odd undertow that suggested the writers were not especially familiar with Wilco's body of work, registering a frequent sense of surprise that an "alt-country" band would make such an adventurous album while ignoring the creative shape-shifting that had been so much a part of Jeff Tweedy and company's approach on Being There and Summerteeth. The irony is that 2004's A Ghost Is Born, the eagerly awaited follow-up to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, is also the Wilco album with the strongest stylistic link to its immediate predecessor, as if their new fans are being given a moment to catch up. A Ghost Is Born hardly sounds like a retread of YHF, but the languid, ghostly song structures, the periodic forays into dissonance, and the pained, hesitant vocals from Jeff Tweedy that were so much a part of that album also take center stage here. But while much of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot had a cool and slightly removed feeling, A Ghost Is Born is considerably warmer and more organic; the extended instrumental breaks in several of the songs (two cuts are over ten minutes long) sound more like a group in full flight than the Pro Tools-assembled structures of YHF. And while Wilco's former secret weapon, Jay Bennett, is now out of the picture, the rest of the group (especially multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, and guitarist/co-producer Jim O'Rourke) fill the gaps with admirable grace and strength. If A Ghost Is Born has a flaw, it's in the songwriting; while this album is a "grower" if there ever was one, revealing more of its unexpected complexities with each spin, there are no songs here as immediately engaging as "War On War," "Heavy Metal Drummer," or "I'm the Man Who Loves You" from YHF, and while "Hummingbirds," "Handshake Drugs," and "Wishful Thinking" are tuneful and charming, they lack the resonance and emotional impact of Tweedy's strongest work. And the album's most purely enjoyable tune, the witty "The Late Greats," closes out the disc after the 15-minute drone dirge of "Less Than You Think," dramatically blunting its effectiveness. A Ghost Is Born confirms what old fans and recent converts already know -- that Wilco is one of America's most interesting and imaginative bands -- and it's brave and compelling listening. But if you're expecting another genre-defying masterpiece, well, maybe we'll get one of those next time.
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