Paul Harrop

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco (79669)

Ever since that guy at Decca turned down the Beatles, record companies have excelled at getting it wrong. When Wilco’s old label, Reprise, refused to issue this album, they proved once again that the ‘biz’ rarely know a good thing when they hear it. Ironically, when the CD eventually appeared in May 2002, it was on Nonesuch, part of the same Warner music conglomerate as Reprise.

You can only assume that the record company exec never got past the first track, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. It’s built upon seven minutes of random piano plinkings, assorted percussion and electrical noise. Drums crash into life, establish a groove, then collapse into silence. Something sounds like a cheese grater being dragged across guitar strings. Over all this, Jeff Tweedy’s slurred voice – never the most tuneful of instruments – wavers. For all its threat of imminent collapse, the song is an oddly affecting declaration of devotion. Perhaps the title was addressed to his record company.

If only Reprise had got as far as the next song – Kamera. They’d have been rewarded with a chugging acoustic guitar-driven number with keyboard washes. But this is undermined by the desolate lyrics. “No it’s not OK” repeats the chorus, implying that the pretty music is mere window-dressing.

That sort of disparity helps give Wilco’s music its edge. Tweedy’’s oblique lyrics constantly throw up paradoxes. On Radio Cure he intones the words “cheer up honey” in the most bereft of voices. And War on War contains the couplet “you have to learn how to die/ if you wanna wanna be alive”.

Jeff Tweedy teamed up with experimental rock maestro Jim O’Rourke for this album, and recorded it in their mutual home town of Chicago. His influence shows in the odd non-musical noises that fizz and burble in the background, and in the way the songs lurch and splutter like an elderly car, constantly threatening to succumb to their own entropy.

The sense of unease and dislocation this engenders is entirely apt, for this is a prophetically post-9/11 album in spirit, if not in specifics (it was all written before that particular watershed). The CD booklet contains shots of skyscrapers. Songs have titles like like War on War, and Ashes of American Flags. Lines like “tall buildings shake/ voices escape...” and “sailors sailing off in the morning” show what was on Tweedy’s mind. But the album chooses to explore an emotional landscape – with themes of uncertainty, resurrection and fire.

It’s not all bleakness though. Heavy Metal Drummer appears to be a wholly sincere evocation of innocent teenage joy in “playing Kiss covers/ beautiful and stoned”. I’m the Man Who Loves You is a boozy affair complete with parping sax and blaring brass section. Jesus Etc features conventional country fiddles and pedal steel in a beautifully melodic love song. Even the forbidding War on War has an almost summery vibe, albeit one undermined by ominous growling synths.

Despite such shafts of sunlight, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s pervading atmosphere is wearily apocalyptic. There are fewer of the lush mellotrons than candied the songs on their previous album, Summerteeth. The relationships described here are rocky, the love hard-won. The songs’ ramshackle musical structures suggest that old certainties can no longer be relied upon.

The album’s been likened to other bands’ experimental work such as the Beatles’ White Album, or Radiohead’s Kid A. But it is personal in a way that they’re not, thanks to the abiding presence of Jeff Tweedy (a couple of band members departed before or during the recording). Sharing the looseness of those albums, it’s more coherent than either, rooted in something deeper, and seeking new ways to describe a world that’s changed.