It's been a busy three years for Wilco. The release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which was many critics' choice for the best album of 2001, was delayed several months by the refusal of Wilco's then-label Reprise to release the record for fear of low sales. Their record label troubles coincided with a personnel shuffle that included lead singer Jeff Tweedy's firing of drummer Ken Coomer and multi-instrumentalist/engineer Jay Bennet.
All of this was caught on video in Sam Jones' utterly boring 2002 documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, and was followed by a national tour and the release of the More Like the Moon EP in 2003. Now, as if their schedules weren't cluttered enough, they've started streaming A Ghost Is Born from their website (http://www.wilcoworld.net), and the album is due out in June.
On A Ghost is Born, Wilco continues to produce solid, introspective material, but the band is developing and changing so predictably that it's hard to say that Ghost is really all that amazing. If Foxtrot was their White Album, then Ghost is Wilco's Abbey Road. And I mean that quite literally. It sounds a lot like Abbey Road. "Hell Is Chrome" and "Hummingbird" have a distinct "Golden Slumbers" feel to them, with march-tempo piano accompaniments and long, sweeping, chordal descents into their cadence points.
At other points of Ghost Wilco gropes around the 1970s for their inspiration. The eleven-minute "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" has a minute-and-a-half Talking Heads-style electric-funk intro, and "Theologians" ("They don't know nothin' about my soul...") hearkens back to the poppier side of David Bowie. The sole rock-out occurs on "I'm A Wheel" which moves along a punky groove with slick, tight production and a high-energy beat.
In general, the songs on Ghost lack the resolve that Wilco usually writes into their recordings. In other words, this album is not going to be much fun live. Lyrically, Tweedy has gone from brooding confessions to almost absent-minded musings. "I was chewing gum for something to do...I was looking for you," he sings on "Handshake Drugs." "Saxophones started blowing me down / I was buried in sound / The taxi cabs were driving me around." On "Muzzle of Bees" he tells his girlfriend, "I'm assuming you got my message on your machine/ I'm assuming you love me, and you know what that means." I hope she does, because I'm not quite sure that I do.
A Ghost is Born is a bit of a letdown-Wilco found that their own act was a little too hard to follow. There are a few too many whispered-from-a-phone-booth love letters ("Less Than You Think" and "At Least That's What You Said") and not enough of the rock and roll that saved Tweedy's soul on Being There or Summer Teeth. Hopefully, these masters aren't getting old. Maybe they need a vacation.
