Wilco: A Ghost is Born

Reviewed by RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * *)

For such an unassuming figure, Wilco mainstay Jeff Tweedy sure seems to have developed a taste for rock'n'roll drama.

The band's previous album, 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, finally emerged after it was rejected by its major label backers who thought it too strange after the sunny country-rock strummings of the American band's previous work.

The saga ended up giving Wilco a publicity leg-up, helped by the illuminating doco I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. The album became their biggest success, and got them noticed beyond alt.country borders.

Now comes A Ghost Is Born, its release delayed because the frontman checked into rehab to deal with an addiction to pain-killers, prescribed for chronic migraines.

There is something wrong-headed and addled about Ghost, which initially is even more challenging an album to contemplate than the sonically distressed Yankee.

But once you get the measure of it, it's fascinating though only sporadically enjoyable. With Tweedy's wistful, reedy voice and manic, cathartic electric guitar excursions, it draws Neil Young comparisons.

But it can also remind of Lou Reed's bleak 70s albums with its intimate scale and mix of piano-based songs occasionally torched by that guitar and the occasional electric meltdown (undoubtedly encouraged by returning producer Jim O'Rourke, who's in Auckland today with his other gig as the fifth Sonic Youth).

It can tempt the fast-forward button, especially on the 10 minutes of Kraftwerk beat and abstract guitar of Spiders or the electronic haze that ends Less Than You Think about 10 minutes later than it should.

But the likes of Hummingbird (with its Eleanor Rigby strings), Wishful Thinking and others show there are also tunes aplenty again trying to break your heart.

For an album that starts off slow and melancholy it ends up somewhere exhausted, hopeful and - on the final track, The Late Greats - self-deprecatingly funny.

It's going to confound even those who first tuned in on Yankee and might well be the sound of Tweedy's throbbing head getting the better of his bruised heart.

Label: Nonesuch