“I’m a Wheel”
from the album A Ghost is Born
2004
iTunes
If there could be such a thing as an American Radiohead, it would have to be Wilco. Jeff Tweedy has propelled his combo far beyond any vestiges of alt-country, and the band increasingly resembles a sonic laboratory constructed from fractious aspects of Tweedy’s personality. Appropriately for a band on Nonesuch, the Wilco displayed here seems as concerned with experiments in sound and unsettling juxtapositions of effects as with four-square rock songwriting. The weird laboratory music of “Less Than You Think” seems to have escaped from a movie by Andrei Tarkovsky, while “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” pits a throbbing electronic pulse against frantically scrabbling guitar. Elsewhere, Tweedy sounds positively Beatle-ish, as on the plonky piano ditty “Hummingbird” or the McCartney-evoking “Theologians.” He also lets rip with blasts of power-chord dementia, and gets loud and punky on “I’m a Wheel.” This is a dramatic, ambitious album that dares you to rise to its challenge.