Wilco continues to manage the extremes

Wilco

8 p.m., April 9. The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. $35. 860-987-6000, bushnell.org.

Wilco is a bit like America’s answer to Radiohead. The band is hugely popular, inspiring major-league fan adoration, loads of Internet documentation and speculation, and ample critical acclaim. Like Radiohead, the Chicago-based group has experimented extensively in the studio, most notably with their 2002 record , which was co-produced by avant-garde musician Jim O’Rourke and which features layers of whirring noise and radio-fuzz effects that seem to both mask and accentuate parts of the tracks.


And perhaps it’s a measure of the band’s success — hitting the sweet-spot for a wide swath of 30-something hipsters — that Wilco, which has been at it for 16 years now, has also inspired its own specific kind of critical dismissal, the smart-ass uber-hip putdown. The band’s 2007 record was famously dissed as “dad-rock” by the taste-makers at . In that respect Wilco may be more like Coldplay; their success and genre- and generation-spanning appeal is something that irks some critics as well as that special subset of hipster who likes to make fun of hipsters. ’s music critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, seemed to especially relish ridiculing what he took to be the pretentious artistic ambiguities of singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics. Robert Christgau has called Wilco’s charms “shallow,” which is strange coming from such a passionate champion of the fleeting and surface-level appeals of pop. You could sum up the Wilco backlash like this: If you have an iPhone, you probably have a Wilco record, and some people hate that. The band’s veneer of tasteful sonic experimentation is never far-out or ear-damaging enough for some. Any music that can successfully and inoffensively be played as mid-volume background music at a dinner gathering of adults is not going to be cool enough. The transgression police will issue a citation for failing to make complacent listeners squirm. 


But there’s not likely to be much squirming when Wilco plays the Bushnell on April 9.


Wilco is the kind of big-name touring act that we don’t see at the Bushnell so often. Or ever. I recently spoke by phone with multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, who plays guitar, keyboards and sings backup for the group. Sansone and the band were in Quebec City during the middle of the Canadian winter. To Wilco’s fans though, it’s the band’s good sense, their ability to fold in tasteful bursts of free-form atonal guitar-playing in the midst of a mellow, country-tinged soft-rock song that makes their sound special. There are hints of shrieking guitar noise and strange studio indulgences but they’re always balanced by restraint. One minute it’s a raw Neil Young rocker, the next it’s blue-eyed soul, air-brushed vocal harmonies, alt-country heartache, poetic quirk. Tweedy’s attempt to both reveal and obscure his ache and vulnerability seems to sit right with a generation that still struggles with the limits of candor, emotional sharing and earnestness.


And the band has achieved a kind of deep balance and organic logic to their playing over the years. As their fans know, some of the players — including guitarist Nels Cline and drummer Glenn Kotche — have side projects as boundary-pushing experimentalists. Sansone and Wilco bassist John Stirratt are involved in the Autumn Defense, a mellow, slightly retro sideproject. Sansone also has a busy schedule playing as a sideman on other projects. He’s recently worked with Kevin Barker of the band Vetiver. He’s recorded with the hypnotic British band the Clientele. He appears on the forthcoming record by British neo-soul auteur Jamie Lidell. And he and Stirratt have just finished work on a new Autumn Defense record. And yet, in Wilco, all of the musicians seem to shelve their alter-egos and work to showcase Tweedy’s material. And when the band records — probably because all of the members have such rich musical outlets — there’s no sense that any of the players is jockeying for the spotlight.


“It seems to just kind of fall into place,” says Sansone. “Certainly there’s experimentation and people working things out, and it’s not completely effortless, but it is very natural as far as the different members realizing their roles in a particular composition. We’ve played so much together now that there’s definitely an unconscious communication happening that we just kind of go with, and sort of seem to fall into our roles. Who knows, maybe on the next record we’ll shake that up a little bit.” 


Another way the band injects elements of surprise and uncertainty into their busy touring schedule is to take e-mail or online requests from fans. That means that portions of each night’s set list are decided by the audience. And for a band with a vast back catalog, that can mean that some nights require a quick brush-up on a deep cut.


“If there’s a high request count for a song that we haven’t played in three years, then we definitely attack it at soundcheck,” he says. “It’s been happening more often than not on this last tour.”


The audience-request scenario demonstrates the band’s comfort with uncertainty. They’re also well-versed in handling the extremes of touring and recording.


Sansone says the band is set to start work on a new record, their eighth, in the summer, after the stretch of touring stops.


“We have our first get-together in late July,” he says. “We’re going to be touring up until June 1. We’re gonna take June and most of July off and then we’ll come back together at the loft in Chicago and sit around in a circle and start bashing some new stuff out.”


In general, Tweedy brings the songs, but that could change slightly this time.


“There’s also been talk of everyone coming in with something and throwing it into a big pile to kick around,” says Sansone.


We’ll also do some stuff like we’ve done on the last couple records where we just jam and see what happens.”

Questions or comments? Email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Share this story:
Facebook |Twitter |Digg |Reddit |Stumbleupon

Comments

Add New Search

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Website:
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."