My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

The conclusion! 

Albums listened to in full:

• Wilco’s The Whole Love. The poisoning of the critical well against Wilco has been a fascinating process to watch. As with any band of Wilco’s stature, there’s always been a vocal minority of dissenters to whom the lively alt-country and pop of their 90s work never made much of an impression, and the widespread praise for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s combination of skeletal folk and pop with finely-detailed arrangements proved baffling*. But “minority” is the key word here; if the oft-used phrase “the American Radiohead” never exactly rang true in terms of sound, the two bands were similarly lauded, similarly bulletproof. Some reviews even granted instant classic status to A Ghost is Born, a collection of decent songs with major deficiencies in execution (made apparent after a retooled lineup breathed some life into that material on the road).
  
  The consensus started to break apart on Sky Blue Sky, the low-key studio debut of the band’s most formidable live configuration—the album where the “dad rock” label really gained traction. If Sky Blue Sky is “dad rock” (valid, I suppose, given the lyrical focus on home life and the band’s least experimental music since A.M.), it’s at least good, interesting dad rock. The guitar solos are uniformly engaging, especially on the Television-esque “Impossible Germany,” and Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics are disarmingly straightforward, his domestic problems unusually free of the violent imagery with which he’s coded them since at least as early as “Via Chicago.”
  
  Then Wilco (The Album) justified virtually every complaint that the naysayers had ever had about Wilco. Where Sky Blue Sky remained complex via Tweedy’s confessional lyrics and maintained a singular style in spite of the classic rock influence, Wilco (The Album) was half-baked ideas, poorly-integrated influences, and an annoyingly assured, laid-back attitude. It was anonymous rock, carrying some of the sonic trademarks of past Wilco albums, but played by an all-too-content band who seemed to have lost interest in challenging themselves.
  
  I wish I could say The Whole Love rights all of these wrongs, but it does right quite a few of them. “Art of Almost” is a rough patchwork of a song with one of the band’s more interesting rhythmic experiments pasted to a killer Nels Cline solo that could probably fit just as well elsewhere. The band’s commitment to the wonky structure more than sells it, though. The combination of midtempo rockers like “I Might,” “Dawned on Me,” and “Standing O” (all better than similar attempts on the previous album) and bright, juicy pop like “Sunloathe” and “Whole Love” suggests a return to the band’s Summerteeth  aesthetic, even if the album doesn’t quite deliver on that level. “One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)” ends things on a promising note—a 12-minute meditation on death and faith with an appropriately gentle hook.
  
  Too little, too late?  Maybe for some folks. As for those who never liked them, I suspect Wilco will never give them much reason to change their minds. Tweedy and company are, at this point, Something White People Like—making them an absolute oddity in U.S. popular entertainment, surely—and they don’t seem particularly concerned with reclaiming their early ’00s critical standing. But The Whole Love makes a pretty good argument to not count them out entirely. 
  
  * How is it that I haven’t read scores of YHF/Bon Iver comparisons? One commonly-aired complaint about Bon Iver’s new album is that the songs are underwritten and formless; they simply get by on atmosphere (or production) alone. Isn’t this true of “Radio Cure” and “Poor Places,” as well? And if the effect works, should we care? What’s the problem with formlessness if the effect sought it textural, as it is in the post-rock that informs Bon Iver’s work (see his Volcano Choir collaboration with Collections of Colonies of Bees) and the avant-garde, electronic, and free jazz influences on YHF-era Wilco?

• Wild Flag’s self-titled. I wrote about the band here, and my opinion hasn’t evolved much since listening to the album since. The late period Sleater-Kinney comparisons (moreso than comparisons to Mary Timony’s other projects) are inevitable and, indeed, I can’t imagine a fan of one not enjoying the other, but the differences are in the details. Brownstein and Weiss’s former band always saved a track or two to celebrate the simple virtues of rocking out, but Wild Flag would border on parody if the sentiment sounded less heartfelt. Also, keyboard.

• Will Hoge’s Number Seven. Solid singer-songwriter rock. Hoge came up when convincingindie and I were discussing Middle Brother or Dawes, I think. The similarities to West Coast artists of this ilk (not so much Dawes or other contemporary Laurel Canyon-influenced acts as quintessential 90s acts like the Wallflowers, Dog’s Eye View, and early Counting Crows) made me think Hoge was an L.A. guy, but he’s apparently from Nashville.  Huh.

• Wolves in the Throne Room’s Celestial Lineage.  Hey, look!  Another instance in which form is fully in service to texture and dynamics; but you don’t see anyone complaining about these guys! Virtually all I know about black metal is what I’ve seen in documentaries and read online. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Mayhem or Burzum song all the way through, and the only thing I know about Marduk is what I’ve learned from that great, sad Mountain Goats song about a bathroom hookup, so I am quite possibly the last person who should be telling you whether this is even black metal at all. That said, it’s not. Case solved.*
  
  I’m old enough to be reasonably sure that I’ll never develop a deep, unquenchable thirst for metal of any kind. But I do like to dabble, and my dabblings have revealed to me that, while I’m primarily into metal vocalists who sing, I’m still slightly more into vocalists who sound like Cookie Monster than vocalists who sound like orcs. So while Celestial Lineage is cinematic and dramatic and epic and all that, I still can’t get past the idea that I’m listening to an album by this guy:
• 
  * Obviously.

• Wugazi’s 13 Chambers. This Doomtree collective mashup album is about as straightforward as it comes: Wu-Tang Clan meets Fugazi. The two catalogs don’t necessarily shed much light on each other; at best, it highlights the funk and reggae impulses powering so much of Fugazi’s work, but doesn’t add much to the Wu-Tang side of things. The new go-to mashup album for people who think the Grey Album is now “dad rock” perhaps? (Leaving the “dad rock” thing alone now; chalk it up to impending parenthood-based touchiness.)

• Wye Oak’s Civilian. It’s a pretty simple formula: when Wye Oak has the right songs to work with, they’re outstanding; when they lean too heavily on their considerable instrumental strengths, they’re a pleasant, ephemeral swirl. Civilian’s heavy on the songs, thankfully, and Jenn Wasner saves her guitar freakouts for where they’re most needed. Stylistically, she and Andy Stack probably arrived a few releases ago, but they’ve hit a new level here, fusing simple folk and pop structures with effects-laden sonics that are effectively shoegaze without actually sounding much like any particular shoegaze band.

• Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers’ Starlight Hotel.  Rather than half-ass this, I’ll just say it was on in the background, and it was a first listen. Muth’s voice made a generally good impression, though!

• 13ghosts’ Garland of Bottle Flies. Reviewed here. I was glad to see Garland mentioned in PopMatters Slipped Disc feature; it’s not the kind of album that wins ‘best of’ polls or inspires scores of soundalikes, but it’s a resonant piece of work made for repeat listens. All of that time in the studio yielded a work that’s as finely detailed as it is visceral.  

Individual songs by the following artists:

• Wild Beasts
• Wiley
• Wire
• Wormrot
• WU LYF
• yMusic
• Youth Lagoon
• Yuck
• Zola Jesus (4)
• Zoo Kid