Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

It looks pretty good on paper: alt-country stalwarts Wilco meet the godfather of post-rock Jim O’ Rourke. And as the opening ‘I Am Trying To Break Your Heart’ suggests, the graft has taken, mainly due to a shared aesthetic of maudlin looseness. Still, who’d have thought Wilco would forsake the groove for urban discombobulation?

Jeff Tweedy’s head is still on the bar, right enough, but instead of being surrounded by a comfortable cast of pedal steels, Stones riffs and Band-like beats, it’s all ticking clocks, backward respiratory loops and plinkety-plonk piano-wire noises.

Wilco have often gotten away with murder by dint of merely tugging forelock to The Replacements and Gram but, without a doubt, O’Rourke’s mixes have shaken up the cocktail – the fairy dust ephemera brought to ‘War On War’ justify his fee alone.

But really the album revolves around the fulcrum of the three songs at its centre. ‘Jesus etc.’ is drenched with September song sadness, while ‘Ashes Of American Flags’, the kind of broken ballad they do best, paints a scarred skyline of cash machines, dropped dimes, Diet Cokes and cigarettes, the detritus of an America that got lost in a day. Here the lumpen beat, bottomless piano and twangy guitar make for an almost Godspeed-y desolation.

The rest isn’t close, but it’s better than average: caustic soda pop in ‘Heavy Metal Drummer’, blue eyed soul in ‘Reservations’, damaged country in ‘The Man Who Loves You’, like Little Feat with Adrian Belew taking the solos.

On Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Wilco are straddling two ponies, one broken, one wild. Next time I’d love to see them stay on the piebald.