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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Wilco’s “Schmilco”

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Jeff Tweedy has always committed his most dastardly imaginary deeds, his most twisted murder balladry and malignant musical misanthropy, right in the cold light of day. He’s also enough of a student of music to slip in an allusion to the late Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson while fully understanding that the singer’s quirky hybrid of tart humor and a zoo full of pop forms isn’t far removed from Wilco’s liberal-arts musical survey, from alt-country to krautrock to the loose-limbed folk featured on their 10th album in more than two decades.

Tweedy is a certified master of the simple, effective melody—time and again, he’s built something grand from the pieces of something seemingly small, and trace evidence of this trick is splattered all over Schmilco. Exhibit A is the album’s lead single, “If I Ever Was A Child,” a quiet bit of ’70s pastiche that floats between three chords (with a few others tacked to the bridge) while proclaiming, “I saw behind my brain a haunted stain/It never fades/I hunt for the kind of pain I can take.” It ain’t exactly “Up With People,” and that’s the point: embedding deeply felt ruminations on our human failings and flaws beneath the kind of deceptively easy popcraft Wilco has traded in since its earliest days, when a different lineup was insisting that it wanted to “thank you all for nothing at all.”

It’s these sweet and sour contradictions—the galloping, sad-eyed “Cry All Day,” the minor-key droopiness of “Happiness,” “Shrug And Destroy,” in all its understated twilight introspection—that have afforded Tweedy as wide a lane for his latter-day work as he might ever choose to drive. It also makes him complicatedly, and utterly, human.

—Corey duBrowa