Release Date: September 27th, 2011
Every fan has a favorite Wilco. For some, it’s the breezy alt-country band of Sky Blue Sky. For others, it’s the chaotic kitchen-sink cooks of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Some fans are stuck between the two extremes, in the realm of Summerteeth. Wilco—a band of venerable indie grandpas—always has drawn in listeners for both its approachability and its conceptualism, its ease and its art.
On The Whole Love, Wilco’s eighth studio album, the 17-year-old band polishes and merges the extremes, packaging a sound more defined than any of its earlier work. It’s a record for every fan.
The album kicks off with—rather, mildly tosses its foot around with—”Art of Almost,” a seven-minute track that begins as a psychedelic haze of soft lyrics and synthesizer and ends a frantic, bleep-bloopin’ jam of layered electric guitars. “I Might” and “Dawned on Me” follow and are more distinctly Wilco, wrapped in rhythmic, key-heavy rock and snappy lyrics.
“Sunloathe” and “Rising Red Lung” are dreamy and achy—a style perfected by frontman Jeff Tweedy on early albums. (Quiet and unsettling are two things the band does very well, but not as often as it should.) Just three songs in, “Sunloathe”‘s lyrics (“I don’t know how to love anything, myself”) will solidly convert those who were drawn to young Tweedy’s self-loathing, lovelorn songwriting—a surely sizable portion of the Wilco fan base.
The Whole Love begs to be listened to all the way through—and again, just to make sure you’ve got the full effect.
Listening with headphones is a fitting recommendation, as the best thing about this album is its musical intricacies. It’s best heard on headphones, according to multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone; the album is subtle on some tracks and bursting on others.
The record’s final song, the 12-minute “One Sunday Morning,” is its greatest victory—the band’s best since 2007’s “You Are My Face.” And yet, it’s a completely different track—mellow and mature and lyrically epic, exploring death and birth and the conflict between. It’s a mesmerizing folk track layered with acoustic guitar, piano and winding, subtle electronica. In context, it’s the perfect ending to the album’s story. But if you weren’t listening carefully — if the songs were playing over the speakers of some Starbucks, if you hadn’t spent the past 11 songs with the band—you might find it dull.
The Whole Love is ambitious and rejuvenating for a band whose biggest hit (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) was released almost 10 years ago. In a way, it’s a response to Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (The Album), which both were criticized for being too soft—too “dad rock,” too focused on Tweedy’s disillusioned lyrics and pleading voice. But between “Art of Almost” and “One Sunday Morning,” Wilco has definitively become an indie-folk band that writes experimental, impress-all-your-friends records seamlessly, without dividing its fans. And it’s about time.
Wilco – The Whole Love tracklist:
- “Art of Almost”
- “I Might”
- “Sunloathe”
- “Dawned on Me”
- “Black Moon”
- “Born Alone”
- “Open Mind”
- “Capitol City”
- “Standing O”
- “Rising Red Lung”
- “Whole Love”
- “One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)”
