Snatched from the brink of potential professional disaster in 2002 by Fate’s uncharacteristically helping hand, it seems Wilco found themselves teetering on the edge again as they approached their fifth album.
The previous "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" sent their former record label into a spin with what it viewed as a commercially suicidal avant-gardism and was promptly rejected. Reprise sold the master tapes back to the band, who then made the material available on their own website, before securing a new deal, this time with Nonesuch. The album ushered the band into the American Top 20 for the very first time.
After all that, you’d imagine sleeves would be well rolled in readiness for "A Ghost Is Born". However, recording sessions were interrupted when Wilco mainman Jeff Tweedy entered rehab for an addiction to painkillers – apparently the result of suffering from frequent, debilitating migraines. That, and the departure of guitarist Jay Bennett, suggested Fate had withdrawn her support, but Wilco were hardly likely to give up the ghost this late in the game.
Their fifth LP, then, is both a rebirth and the consolidation of Wilco’s status as America’s most consistently challenging alt.country act. Jim O’Rourke – now serving full-time in the Sonic Youth camp – is again on board, this time as co-producer, but he’s actually guided the band back from the radical electronic texturing that marked out "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" toward more immediate and recognisable territory.
Not that Wilco are playing it straight. Although the gloriously ragged and raging guitar workouts that distinguish the opener, "At Least That’s What You Said" set Tweedy alongside Neil Young in the pantheon of country-rock greats, his loop, filter and synth work on the thrumming, drone-heavy 15-minute epic, "Less than You Think" marks him out as a maverick and mercurial talent, as does the odd but engaging "Hummingbird", which could be an outtake from Bowie’s "The Man Who Sold The World". "Spiders (Kidsmoke)", too, is extraordinary, affecting the steady, comforting motorik drive of Neu!, while a descending scale of blues-drenched guitar notes is hammered out, Tweedy’s strings sounding like they’re being attacked with a hacksaw.
It’s all thrillingly energised, warmly organic and welcoming stuff, stamped with the hallmarks of both the finest bar band in existence and a bunch of true sonic adventurers. Long may Wilco roam.
