Wilco’s 11th studio album, apparently, is Jeff Tweedy confronting rockism (the belief that rock is the natural state of music. In short: the celebration of all things guitary and “authentic” over music that is shiny and instant). “Rockism is not intellectually an honest place to be, so this is more just a personal observation of what I don’t want to do,” he has said. Hence the abrupt step change here: bright shiny synths replace guitars, three songs are written by Charli XCX, and the songs are structured around huge singalong choruses, with Tweedy’s voice Auto-Tuned to within an inch of its life.
Not really. Of course not. Because as Tweedy also said of rockism: “I’m afraid that we are not going to have any audience any more if we don’t keep perpetuating this.” So Ode to Joy will not scare away the existing fans: it’s not an experimental album at all; in fact it’s so stripped back it’s sometimes arid, with acoustic guitar and a deadened, deliberately martial and plodding drum kit the dominant sounds (don’t fret: there are some explosive Nels Cline guitar solos, too). Tweedy’s crisis is expressed lyrically, rather than musically, though it’s only the knowledge of his feelings that sends one looking for clues. “I never change / You never change / There’s no decision / Sometimes I’m just a hole for you to get in,” he sings on Bright Leaves. Is he singing about a lover, or about his fans? In One and a Half Stars, he complains: “I’m left with only my desire to change” and “I can’t escape my domain.”
These are songs where the expressiveness of the lyrics and the baldness of the music – usually big, simple blocks, put together like Lego – work in tandem. The plainness of the instrumentation heightens the uncertainty and ambivalence in Tweedy’s writing, in which he seems to be searching for reasons – to justify not just Wilco, but existence itself. “Are we all in love just because?” he wonders on Hold Me Anyway. “No!” he replies. “I think it’s poetry and magic / Something too big to have a name.” Maybe the next record will be the one with the Charli XCX songs. We’ll see.
