{"id":10741,"date":"2011-12-15T11:01:03","date_gmt":"2011-12-15T16:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=10741"},"modified":"2011-12-15T18:02:44","modified_gmt":"2011-12-15T23:02:44","slug":"wilco-then-and-now-yankee-foxtrot-hotel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wilco-then-and-now-yankee-foxtrot-hotel\/","title":{"rendered":"Wilco, Then and Now: <em>Yankee Foxtrot Hotel<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cJbLvQkCwRc?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>In revisiting past record reviews I&#8217;ve had published on Wilco albums through the years <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/index.php\/kinged-gets-inside-your-head-for-a-minut\/\" target=\"_blank\">only one failed to capture my attention for more than a few minutes, my least favorite Wilco album, <em>Sky Blue Sky<\/em><\/a>. I&#8217;ve got to give it to the band for their consistency. I&#8217;ll leave it to you to give it to me for my own. Following is a review of <em>Yankee Foxtrot Hotel<\/em> that appeared on a now long-defunct music blog that&#8217;s better left forgotten.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The experience of listening to any new Wilco album is fraught with mixed emotions. I like the fact that they&#8217;re a band that knows what it means to at least want to be great. They&#8217;re a guitar-based band with the sonic core of that strain of Classic Rock, that began with Bob Dylan&#8217;s landmark electric albums and ran through The Band, the Stones&#8217; Mick Taylor era, and Neil Young. Like those artists they&#8217;ve got an experimental bent, even pulling in the occasional <em>Pet Sounds<\/em><span style=\"text-align: -webkit-auto;\">, minimalist, and &#8220;European&#8221; influences. They can rock pretty hard, in the way their denim-clad forefathers did, and they seem like they actually read books\u2014high-brow novels, history tomes, and the like. They use authentic instruments: vintage guitars and organs that make squeaky, clicky noises during the quiet songs. I&#8217;m a sucker for that stuff!<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Overlooking the nonsense of critics and hipster <em>kidz<\/em> who feel the need to throw around the term <em>electronics<\/em> when discussing the band&#8217;s records, as if we&#8217;re living in the time of Thomas Edison and musicians are first experimenting with electricity, there are some things that gnaw at me as soon as I hit PLAY on any Wilco album. Primarily, I&#8217;m bugged by the fact that this band I should love is nothing more than a band I like. Even the songs I start out loving fade into the <em>Like<\/em> bin. There&#8217;s a sameness to the music of Wilco that too readily dictates which songs I&#8217;m going to like and which songs I&#8217;ll quickly skip.<\/p>\n<p>The songs I like are always the 1960s-cum-Replacements-cum-ELO 2-chord stomps with cool guitar and keyboard textures underpinning a deliberate bassline. Jeff Tweedy puts his reedy voice to best use on these numbers with lyrics about his downer-popping, screwed up, seemingly eternally recent past. The new album&#8217;s &#8220;Kamera&#8221; and &#8220;I&#8217;m the Man Who Loves You&#8221; each fit that bill. A few weeks ago, if you asked me whether I liked those songs I would have answered, &#8220;Are you kidding me? I <em>love<\/em> them!&#8221; Shoot, &#8220;I&#8217;m the Man Who Loves You&#8221; even works in a soaring horn section. Rock nerds live for that stuff! If you ask me today, though, my enthusiasm would be tempered, thanks to the band&#8217;s other main song template.<\/p>\n<p>That other main song template I find myself skipping over on Wilco&#8217;s new album is their mellow style, characterized by a bed of swirling Wurlitzer organ, tinkling piano, and Tweedy singing in the voice of a dying Confederate soldier taking his last breaths while clutching his newborn son to his chest. When songs like &#8220;Radio Cure&#8221; and &#8220;Ashes of American Flags&#8221; start up I first try to gauge how their latest effort at writing a &#8220;Whispering Pines&#8221; will stack up before briefly trying to imagine what it must be like to prefer downers to uppers. Then I hit SKIP. Life&#8217;s too short for more than one of those songs on any artist&#8217;s album. Wilco&#8217;s too decent an attempted great band, too loaded with gently chugging numbers like &#8220;War on War&#8221; to drag listeners down with that stuff.<\/p>\n<p>The band also finds time to indulge in a wholly experimental side, which I can appreciate. It&#8217;s yet another part of their attempted greatness. <em>Yankee Foxtrot Hotel<\/em>, for instance, kicks off with &#8220;I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,&#8221; which makes use of found sounds. I like it. I even admire the sickening self-indulgence of &#8220;Reservations.&#8221; The production shifts are ambitious and well done, if loaded with all the proctomusicalogical baggage a <strong>Mitchell Froom<\/strong> could imagine. As much as I appreciate this kind of stuff, though, it inevitably makes me hate myself, like I feel after eating an entire <a href=\"http:\/\/hannaford.gsnrecipes.com\/GetImage.aspx?vector=xOz68UCXO4zAXJKjo0L8C+NgRpRqCxtWAZbG+kWHrkke21xRZClo8jdaqitFi03g\" target=\"_blank\">Entenmann&#8217;s Banana Cake<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll keep trying with Wilco and continue digging the really enjoyable songs, especially when I give their albums a couple of months off between spins, to keep them fresh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In revisiting past record reviews I&#8217;ve had published on Wilco albums through the years only one failed to capture my attention for more than a few minutes, my least favorite Wilco album, Sky Blue Sky. I&#8217;ve got to give it to the band for their consistency. I&#8217;ll leave it to you to give it to <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wilco-then-and-now-yankee-foxtrot-hotel\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[65,551],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}