Twilight Overland
by Jeff Tweedy
Although we observe America unravelling, we can’t feel how it is living inside such uncertainty and descent into division.
Musicians could tell us something, but many hip-hop and R’n’B artists seem too self-involved or busy settling scores; rockers are inconsistent and others simply stick to their lane.
Singer-songwriters have the skills to take us there and on this fifth solo album Jeff Tweedy – of prolific Americana band Wilco – allows himself room to move: it’s a triple.
Although not overtly political, across these 30 songs there’s a palpable sense of defeat, from the acoustic folk setting of the opener One Tiny Flower with “the grass is growing all over town. From the cracks in the sidewalks where the shops shut down” to the closer Enough: “Is your heart tired? Don’t lie. Is your heart hiding from your fire? It’s hard to stay in love with everyone.”
He can be morose (“there’s a fading flag I keep flying half-mast” on Caught Up in the Past), darkly poetic (the droll spoken word Parking Lot), uncomfortably personal (the final half of the first disc) and reflectively escapist on the title track: “I’d love a quiet day, some place where I could go and stay.”
With a small band that includes his two sons, this is a mostly engrossing, downbeat acoustic affair but there can be staggering weirdness in the instrumental passages on KC Rain (No Wonder), New Orleans and the bleak Wedding Cake.
The deliberately pedestrian pace of Feel Free is an affirmative moment: “Feel free to fall in love with the people you know, fall harder for people you don’t.”
Lou Reed Was My Babysitter celebrates his rock’n’roll guide using Reed’s menacing speak-sing manner: “Rock’n’roll is dead, the dead don’t die.”
There are half-formed songs but this vast collection – his acoustic White Album? – impresses in its accumulation of detail and consistent mood.
It’s absorbing, although Tweedy is under that twilight pall: “Ain’t it a shame when you wanna die, on a beach in the sun. Not a cloud in the sky and that’s just not how dying’s done.”
Bleeds
by Wednesday
North Carolina alt-country-cum-indie-rock outfit Wednesday attract attention because guitarist MJ Lenderman’s parallel solo career peaked with 2024’s acclaimed Manning Fireworks.
The reason he’s left Wednesday’s touring band are all over Bleeds where singer/founder Karly Hartzman (his former partner) howls in her storytelling and delivers loaded threats as his guitar collides, like cats scratching at a blackboard. As nerve ends fray it becomes visceral, especially when a hailstorm of guitar noise washes in.
Wasps is a terrifying 90-second scream of anguish.
So here’s country-rock (Townies implodes everything into three chaotic minutes); the conciliatory-sounding Elderberry Wine with lap steel; and Gary’s II – further detail added to Gary’s on their 2021 Twin Plagues album – a brutal, bluegrass-pickin’ account of a street fight with a baseball bat.
Like a mutation of angry country colliding with Sonic Youth and shoegaze, Bleeds is as threateningly real as when the bikers, on the fearful quiet-loud dynamic of Pick Up That Knife, say, “They’ll meet you outside.”
These albums are available as downloads, on CD and vinyl.
