Tracks
Wilco: "Impossible Germany"
(2007)
By Conrad Amenta | 31 January 2008
Add Sky Blue Sky to whatever music program you use (okay, fine, iTunes) and you'll notice under “genre” it won't say indie, alt-country, noodlanding, conceptual migraines, Documentaries About the State of the Industry or Chicago, but “Classic Rock.” Maybe Wilco is one of those bands we trust to use this Titanic of a modifier, for whom we'll overlook that even an informed reading of classic rock music won't necessarily transform a band's music into instant classic rock. For whom we'll forget that “classic” status is something earned after years of retrospective contextualizing and consistent success.
This is Wilco, one of the few bands to scrape the underside of Radiohead's ceiling of automatic credibility. This is the Wilco who, while straining to balance ambiguous concepts and perhaps what is the beginning of a series of calculated return-to-forms, is given benefit of the doubt. "Impossible Germany," the first single from the band's forthcoming and my-dad's-soon-to-be-favorite album, is the Wilco equivalent of “There There”: a confident display of effortless melody and virtuosity that is still instantly recognizable as a revisitation of genres the band has already, supposedly, mastered.
On just his first studio album with Wilco, Nels Cline's guitar work is already one of the group's dominant features, for better or worse. “Impossible Germany” is still Tweedy by and large, whose fundamental and central guitar melody anchors and directs the song, but when Cline departs on another of his shuddering, traumatized takes on a classic rock solo, it's so idiosyncratically not Tweedy's that it feels a bit like an invasion. Where on A Ghost is Born (2004) tracks “At Least That's What You Said” and “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” Cline was given temporary center stage and the novelty of his controlled chaos became an effective contrast in such expansive, open
arrangements**, on “Impossible Germany” the whole exercise has the feeling of excess. The song is, at its root, another “classic” Wilco song; the extended, jogging guitar outro builds beautifully on such fragile opening threads. But Cline's guitar is a big personality in what is suddenly an overcrowded guitar presence.
I think Wilco's appeal has been the centrality of Tweedy's nervous, affable vulnerability, his everyman-with-an-acoustic accessibility and knack for poetic confession. Here he is relegated to cast member, oddly outshone and hard to find under the quaking musicianship of this decidedly un-Wilco-like version of the band I'd come to love. “Impossible Germany” might be a more democratic result, but it also reminds us of just how long Wilco has been Tweedy's show to run.
** Correction: Sorry CMG readers, we got this one wrong -- Nels Cline didn't actually join the group until Kicking Television in 2005, a year after A Ghost is Born's release. Rather, it was Tweedy himself, channeling his inner-Nels, playing guitar on "At Least That's What You Said" and "Spiders (Kidsmoke)." Our mistake.
This is Wilco, one of the few bands to scrape the underside of Radiohead's ceiling of automatic credibility. This is the Wilco who, while straining to balance ambiguous concepts and perhaps what is the beginning of a series of calculated return-to-forms, is given benefit of the doubt. "Impossible Germany," the first single from the band's forthcoming and my-dad's-soon-to-be-favorite album, is the Wilco equivalent of “There There”: a confident display of effortless melody and virtuosity that is still instantly recognizable as a revisitation of genres the band has already, supposedly, mastered.
On just his first studio album with Wilco, Nels Cline's guitar work is already one of the group's dominant features, for better or worse. “Impossible Germany” is still Tweedy by and large, whose fundamental and central guitar melody anchors and directs the song, but when Cline departs on another of his shuddering, traumatized takes on a classic rock solo, it's so idiosyncratically not Tweedy's that it feels a bit like an invasion. Where on A Ghost is Born (2004) tracks “At Least That's What You Said” and “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” Cline was given temporary center stage and the novelty of his controlled chaos became an effective contrast in such expansive, open
arrangements**, on “Impossible Germany” the whole exercise has the feeling of excess. The song is, at its root, another “classic” Wilco song; the extended, jogging guitar outro builds beautifully on such fragile opening threads. But Cline's guitar is a big personality in what is suddenly an overcrowded guitar presence.
I think Wilco's appeal has been the centrality of Tweedy's nervous, affable vulnerability, his everyman-with-an-acoustic accessibility and knack for poetic confession. Here he is relegated to cast member, oddly outshone and hard to find under the quaking musicianship of this decidedly un-Wilco-like version of the band I'd come to love. “Impossible Germany” might be a more democratic result, but it also reminds us of just how long Wilco has been Tweedy's show to run.
** Correction: Sorry CMG readers, we got this one wrong -- Nels Cline didn't actually join the group until Kicking Television in 2005, a year after A Ghost is Born's release. Rather, it was Tweedy himself, channeling his inner-Nels, playing guitar on "At Least That's What You Said" and "Spiders (Kidsmoke)." Our mistake.