July 14, 2009

As was the case last year, NPR Music will broadcast live from George Wein’s Folk Festival 50 – aka Newport Folk Festival – and CareFusion Jazz Festival 55 – aka

Wilco’s a peculiar musical addiction: most of their songs don’t quite bowl you over as much as sneak up on you, and you’re hooked long before you know it. On what, exactly? It’s different for everyone, but is some variation on songs and a core sound that are an uneasily balanced dichotomy: pastoral melodies that give way to apocalyptic sounding guitar squalls; plangent pop and alt-country tunes that find themselves torn open to reveal molten jams and psychedelic cores churning beneath. Jeff Tweedy seems to wear all that on his face: a goofy grin has a way of morphing into a teeth-baring growl, a bemused smile into a terrified caterwaul. His band mates seem like nice enough chaps. They also give no quarter when there’s rocking to be done.

You Never Know – Wilco w/ Feist and Ed Droste

Wilco (The Album) is Wilco’s latest, and like most Wilco albums grows on you insistently. There’s nothing on it to match 2004’s A Ghost Is Born (to these ears, the band’s masterpiece, indulgences and all), although the gems, such as the gorgeous One Wing and the stormy, head-splitting Bull Black Nova, have definitely revealed themselves. Wilco mined heavily from the new record on a laid back, groovy, immensely satisfying two-plus hours at the home of the Cyclones in Brooklyn: a show that took some time to get going – sluggish band and sluggish crowd alike – but once it hit its stride, made for that classic Wilco balance of mess and finesse.

I maintain – and it’s hardly a unique opinion – that hiring Nels Cline is the best decision Tweedy’s ever made. Cline plays guitar as if it’s an extension of a seizure, his arms and torso shaking as he peels off fuzzy, sheety sounds and hot-toned blasts of guitar noise, dismantling Wilco delicacies like Handshake Drugs and Impossible Germany and forcing them into oblivion, with the rest of the band by now well aware of when to follow him down the rabbit hole. At Keyspan, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, especially, was as animated as I’ve ever seen him, tucking all sorts of filigree in behind Cline’s machinations. Tweedy himself was playful and mischievous, spinning his microphone chord, stalking around the stage and making warm banter with a crowd that awoke sometime around that “Germany” and from that point kept up its end, too.

READ ON for more of Chad’s thoughts on Wilco at Keyspan Park…