leave the label -- immediately.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot now arrives in stores, intact, on Nonesuch. Like Reprise, Nonesuch is a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner. Essentially, the mother firm paid for the album twice. I would love to see one of the suits explain that to the shareholders.
They're still getting a bargain. One of the most talked-about records of the past year, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was rumored to be crackpot pop -- Radiohead's Kid A dressed in flannel and cow pie. And there is genuine bedlam here. Creepy pianos and whooping synthesizers zoom in and out of the music like pissed-off ghosts. The close-miked vocals of songwriter-guitarist Jeff Tweedy have a strong edge-of-madness air.
But the sum of those parts -- mixed by Jim O'Rourke (Sonic Youth, Stereolab) -- is really an earthy, moving psychedelia, eleven iridescent-country songs about surviving a blown mind and a broken heart. In Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Tweedy, bassist John Stirratt, keyboard-guitar player Leroy Bach and drummer Glenn Kotche actually bring you the enchanting sound of things falling apart -- and gingerly, doggedly coming together again. This is an honest, vivid chaos, and it tells a good story.
The first song, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," is a minutely detailed portrait of the singer as blind drunk. Vibes, drums, piano, fuzz guitar and bicycle bells stumble over one another like they've been thrown out of a bar, and Tweedy slurs his metaphors in a heavy whiskey breath: "I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue/I'm hiding out in the big city blinking/What was I thinking when I let go of you?" Later, in "I'm the Man Who Loves You," Tweedy comes to his senses in a blaze of country-funk joy, packed with dobro, Salvation Army-style brass and outbursts of ham-metal guitar. By the end of the album, Tweedy is pledging himself with confidence ("I've got reservations/About so many things/But not about you"), his voice afloat in a shimmering pool of strings, keyboards and bowed cymbal. If you could transcribe the panic, apology and serenity of hard-won love in musical notation, this is exactly how it would sound.
Radio, as a theater of imagination and an emblem of distance and connection, is a recurring theme for Wilco. The cover of their 1995 debut, A.M., was a photo of an old AM/FM receiver. This album's title comes from the phonetic alphabet used in military communication and shortwave transmission; in "Poor Places," a woman's voice repeats the phrase "yankee hotel foxtrot" like an SOS, through a whiteout of guitar distortion. In the pale b
