WILCO - A GHOST IS BORN

Alot of people already have this record, nobody has to listen to me say this. I have alot of records, I feel ive listened to most of them, and am still convinced this is maybe the greatest work of music to have come out in my adult life.  

Look, I mean its just a rock album with guitars and whatnot. Every band in the last fifteen years or so has to go through the same dilemma of pulling out things from the past and rearranging them into some suited method, and this is no different.  But man, its the things they choose.  Neil Young / Tom Verlaine style guitar freakouts, long motorik krautrock beats ala Can or Neu, vain failed attempts at recreating the brill building sound (think about Randy Newman if he was doing heroin and gave up writing songs about toys to go get his fists tattooed and punch your mom in the face while reading her Sartre).  [How can those not be the right things?]

I mean Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was great and all, almost every song on it could’ve been a single.  I think thats why I have so many problems with it. Like Pet Sounds. It was all hailed as this experimental pop masterpiece but it just wasn’t fucked up enough.  There was no listening to David Bowie forget who he was on ‘Station to Station’ or hearing Neil Young try to make a record in the middle of an emotional breakdown (Tonight’s the Night).  Those masterpieces were accidents, like candid pictures, and when you dialed the needle on to the vinyl, you could almost hear an actual person going about their life on the other end.  Jeff Tweedy had received a submarine sandwich of critical acclaim after writing YHF, and instead of breaking down and holing up for the next twenty years, or descending into self parody he just sort of turned up and said ‘i don’t know, this is what i’ve got’.  And it worked, and it would never happen again. A lot of great art happens out of some sort of depression, and what could possibly be more depressing than finally becoming successful?

Blah blah only american response to kid A / amnesiac blah.

File under : guitar sections that make me want to have sex with people.

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