Album Review: Wilco, Ode To Joy

Following a year marked by two solo albums and an autobiography, Jeff Tweedy marshalled the troops, hunkered down at The Loft Studio, primed the cannons, sharpened the axes and prepared to sally forth once again. The military metaphors are no accident. There's a sense throughout the album of a slow inexorable march in a landscape of mud and barbed wire - with little sense of the destination. All hinges on the most basic of elements: sparsely strummed nylon-strung guitars; woozy electric fireflies; and always the simplest of beats - Glenn Hotchke keeping time like the hortator of a galley-ship.

For an album titled Ode To Joy, Wilco's 11th has a curiously downbeat mood. There is little variation in its stark percussive pulse; clanking guitars and rusty clockwork gears creaking like a worn mattress with the springs poking through. Maybe it's a reflection of Tweedy's observation, in response to world events that, "This terrible stuff is happening, this deepening sense of creeping authoritarianism that weighs on everybody's psyche on a daily basis."

In this light, Ode To Joy becomes a journal of resistance in beleaguered times. The relentless trudging breaks into an occasional canter on songs such as 'One And A Half Stars', while 'Everyone Hides' is almost jaunty. And - just to confound this reviewer - the final track, 'An Empty Corner', lapses into waltz-time.

"Nobody needs more Wilco music." These aren't my words but come straight from the Tweedy-horse's mouth: tongue in cheek perhaps. Feel free to disagree, nonetheless.

6/10