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Album of the week with Wilco: A bit of support in conflict

2022-05-27T15:54:40.084Z


The veteran rockers from Wilco are depressively messing around in the studio after the Corona crisis, but "Cruel Country" still warms the heart - our album of the week. And: the debut of London rap sensation Jeshi.


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Rock band Wilco

Photo: Charles L Harris

Album of the week:

You could say that Jeff Tweedy has spent his life balancing despair with confidence.

As early as the end of the 1980s, in »No Depression«, a song by his former band Uncle Tupelo, which became synonymous with what was then a new alternative country movement in the USA, it was longing for salvation: »I'm going where there's no depression/ To a better land that's free from care/ I'll leave this world of toil and trouble/ My home's in heaven/ I'm going there.«

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Wilco

Cruel country

Label: dBpm Records

Label: dBpm Records

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The verses, of course, weren't written by him or singer-co-songwriter Jay Farrar, but by the Carter Family, who recorded the song in America in 1936 during the Great Depression.

Tweedy, now 54 years old and frontman of the successful and internationally acclaimed rock band Wilco for almost 30 years, luckily didn't leave the misery of the world for heaven, even though he tried for a long time to numb his pain with opioids.

Tweedy survived that too.

But the sadness, what is today referred to as anxiety, the existential fear of being thrown, has remained.

"Between good and bad/ And what is true/ Between happy/ And sad/ I choose you," he sings today, still swaying, in the wonderfully hungover "Tonight's The Day."

This "you" does not have to be love or even Tweedy's wife Susie,

who was seriously ill for a long time.

In Tweedy's sadly tried world, this "you" is probably always and primarily the music.

On "Cruel Country", the twelfth Wilco album since 1995, this "you" also stands for America, that homeland that is loved and hated at the same time, whose brutal abyss of unlimited possibilities has been the subject of so many country, folk and rock songs.

Based on a rather loose concept, Wilco dedicate 21 new songs written by Tweedy to the USA, ranging from the pioneering days of immigration and self-discovery to a not otherworldly but cosmic utopia in which a state of "no depression" actually seems possible.

Musically, the band, which over the years has repeatedly expanded its sound, which was trained in Byrds and Beatles, but also in noise and post-punk, to include krautrock and electronics, is returning to its roots.

But just because it says country doesn't mean it's yee-haw and yodel: the album title refers to the country rather than the genre.

On the one hand.

On the other hand, Bob Dylan fled to the »Nashville Skyline« in 1969, in the darkest time of upheaval, singing more beautifully and clearly than ever before.

Anyone who doesn't understand country as a cowboy hat waving, depraved and arch-conservative hit business, but as a community service, as gathering around a warming musical campfire with simple, truthful melodies, is on the right track to developing this album.

This is very long at around 77 minutes and at first glance offers little stylistic variety ("Falling Apart (Right Now)") between acoustic and steel guitar in a devout mid-tempo or waltz.

Tweedy starts off with a brief homage to Dylan with "I Am My Mother," then his voice becomes more and more cracked and soft, singing its way openly and vulnerablely through "Hints" and "Ambulance" until it descends into a very puny singsong "The Empty Condor" becomes, which makes Wilco sound like Radiohead on "OK Computer."

The lyrics are largely opaque and personal, there are no overtly political statements or Neil Young-esque rants, and yet the trembling of the American individual can be read between the lines, society's quarrels with each other, post-Trump, post-pandemic, forked,

more unreconciled than ever in all their violence and cruelty, but also beauty and greatness.

"It's a cruel country, and it's so beautiful.

Love it or leave it,” Tweedy writes in the lyrics to the album.

The band, which includes John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Mikael Jorgensen, Pat Sansone and Nels Cline alongside Tweedy, had originally been planning an 'artpop' album when lockdown began, but have now found themselves recording the live together for the first time since the 1990s albums in the studio.

A community exercise to find out whether you have become estranged - or is it still possible to play music with other people in a room, to argue, to find compromises - and then to reach that magical moment in which the music attracts the individual merged into a sublime unity.

The rock band as a grassroots democratic family and experimental arrangement, it could hardly be more American.

Ultimately, however, there are also magical moments for the listeners on this long, self-contemplative album stretch, on which your feet threaten to fall asleep: the almost Pink Floyd-esque »Many Worlds«, for example, the glittering, playful, jungle-like in the second part freely rotating middle section »Bird Without A Tail/ Base Of My Skull«, the forgiving, upbeat country folk ballad »Tired of Taking It Out On You« or the sad »Darkness Is Cheap« complete with a melancholy flugelhorn.

"It's hard to watch nothing change," Tweedy concludes, perpetually fatalistic, in "The Plains."

But what doesn't change either: that Wilco is a band whose music guarantees reliable support in conflict.

Also for non-Americans.

(7.5)

Listened briefly:

Marina Satti – »Yenna«

It's amazing that Marina Satti didn't release her debut album until she was 35.

In 2017, the Greek-Sudanese singer and actress had an international YouTube hit called "Mantissa", which of course you didn't notice in Germany, which was rather ignorant of pan-European music.

Educated at Berklee College in Boston and a pop star in her native land as well as the founder and artistic director of a cappella group Fonés and female choir Chόres, Satti is a sort of Greek Rosalía: on her album (Yenna = birth) infatuated she mixes traditional styles reaching as far as Arabia and often hand-clapping rhythms with modern electronic beats and dance music, most effectively on her single »Pali«, one of the secret summer hits of the past year.

Her lyrics deal with finding identity and the torn between the striving for female autonomy and the longing for belonging to a country or a partner.

Emotions that are revealed in gloomy, suggestive songs like “Ase me na Figo” (“Let me go”) or the polyphonic ballad “Ponos Krifos” (“Repressed pain”), even if you don't understand Greek.

(7.8)

The Candles – »Horses & Flames«

Why do you have to choose between horses and flames?

Can't you just go through the ring of fire with the horse... or something?

The Berliners by choice, Die Candles, who hail from Ludwigslust, owe no answer to the question from the title song (“Do you want horses or flames?”) on their second album, but that in no way diminishes the enjoyment of their new album, produced by producer Jochen Naaf (including Giant Rooks) beautifully polished pop songs.

Singer Felix Keiler has neither the grace nor the hairstyle, but sings as sensuously and bittersweetly as a revenant of the glittering, reveling New Romantic sound of the eighties.

So fans of China Crisis, Double or Aztec Camera will get their money's worth, especially thanks to bassist Fabian Rose, who makes »Cabriolet« a fast-paced funk hit,

and the retro accents of keyboardist Jelena Von Eisenhart-Rohe, the band's secret star.

»The candles are now playing on the radio, I told you,« Keiler sings self-deprecatingly in »Dust to Dust«.

These willfully uncool German dream poppers used to do that with songs like »True Love« from their debut album, at least in Berlin, but now the candles are really burning bright and ablaze.

Who needs horses?

(7.8)

700 Bliss - »Nothing To Declare«

The music of this collaboration from Philadelphia has to be worked through, as the avant-garde musician Moor Mother, who has already been honored here several times, and her partner DJ Haram know very well.

In the spoken word track "Easyjet" they make fun of jaded critics who find their sound too gloomy, too willfully jagged and generally too bulky.

"Bitch Make Room" is defiantly and self-confidently called at another, also very good passage ("Nightflame") over hectic Daburka drums, trembling beats and basses that are set in such a way that you have to concentrate very much to get to the rhythm dance.

phew

Nonetheless, the second album, actually overloaded and often very didactic, has many cathartic moments that make this challenging experiment on the threshold between conscious hip-hop, dance, noise,

Making jazz and angry female punk attitude compelling.

The nervous, soon to be breathless house track "Anthology", for example, a homage to the black dance pioneer Katherine Dunham, the drum'n'bass dribble named after the US basketball player "Candace Parker" (with the Palestinian musician Muqata 'a) or the trap horror film »Discipline«, with a breathy conspiracy, which formulates the »guerrilla warfare« of these two dance dictators.

Relentless.

who formulates the »guerrilla warfare« of these two dance dictators.

Relentless.

who formulates the »guerrilla warfare« of these two dance dictators.

Relentless.

(7.0)

Yeshi - »Universal Credit«

Starting with puking in the streets, 27-year-old London rapper Jeshi vents his frustration at the misery and dreariness that has defined his life so far on »Sick« and the oppressive tracks that follow from his debut album.

His father was deported to Jamaica, his mother was in prison for a while, he grew up with his grandmother, he pays tribute to both of them in »Two Moms«.

After unsuccessful first singles, he lived on the meager British welfare system, thanks to the harsh austerity policy of the Tories a lot less than Hartz IV. He almost became one of those hopeless young knife muggers and drug zombies whose bankruptcy and misery the English public is increasingly concerned about , but now Jeshi with suggestive,

tracks like »Violence« or »Killing Me Slowly« stumbling over sad piano loops, an eloquent, laconic and precise chronicler of that unloved fucked-up »generation«, which he describes in the central piece.

Kitchen sink realism for the 21st century.

(8.0)

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2022-05-27

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