The Whole Love by Wilco. Photo / Supplied
If Wilco followers, especially those who signed on during their celebrated left-turn period of 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and 2004's A Ghost Is Born, might have felt the band's more recent albums were playing it safe, then help is at hand.
Track one of this eighth album comes entitled Art
of Almost and it's among the seven most remarkable minutes in the avant-Americana outfit's career.
With its cracked lopsided beat - which sounds like it escaped the lab where the likes of Radiohead and Massive Attack once worked - it throbs forth under gathering strings and frontman Jeff Tweedy's sinuous vocals. It then pauses, gathers its breath and builds to a mad flame-out, fired by Nels Cline's scorched earth guitar.
Ten songs later, the set ends with another epic. But One Sunday Morning is a far gentler bookend, a largely acoustic-powered meander for Tweedy to reflect affectingly on the passing of his father.
Between that madness and sadness lies ... well, another fine Wilco album, one which throws in everything from bent powerpop (I Might with its New Wave organ and Iggy-sampling vocals as well as the similarly spiky Standing O and Dawned on Me) to pastoral psychedelia (Black Moon and Rising Red Lung) to a nod to the band's alt-country beginnings (the waltz-time, pedal steel lope of Open Mind).
