Over the past couple of years, as Ryan Adams' star has risen and every earnest singer-songwriter in America has decided Springsteen wasn't a hidebound old bore after all, the idea of alternative country has seemed more and more laughable. What began as a means of re-inventing old traditions has ended up perpetuating them: dull, reactionary music for ageing suburbanites who own a couple of Cormac McCarthy novels.
The thing is, though, alt-country was a great idea when Jeff Tweedy accidentally stumbled upon it as co-leader of Uncle Tupelo. And, as he fearlessly pushes his current band Wilco forward, it miraculously remains so. 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot', Wilco's fourth album, has heroically little in common with the likes of those who've plodded in Tupelo's footsteps - even though that just might have been a lap steel guitar threading its way through the background of 'Jesus Etc'.
Instead, Tweedy takes conventional songforms birthed on his acoustic guitar and scrambles them completely, reassembled into fractured, dissonant epics with the help of the reliably brilliant Jim O'Rourke. Almost everything here is drenched in static and atmospherics, so that it becomes both discomforting and oddly affecting. What's more, this precisely-constructed sound is unusually connected to the lyrics: Tweedy's subject matter is how messages of love become misunderstood over long distances, just as radio signals and shortwave codes become distorted in broadcast.
Clever stuff, then - too clever for Wilco's old label Reprise, who refused to release 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot' last year. Wisely, the band bought the tapes for $50,000, streamed them on their website, caused a sensation in the American music business, and ended up signed to Nonesuch - part of the same AOL Time-Warner conglomerate as Reprise, hilariously. The short-sightedness is astonishing, for Tweedy has constructed an album with deep musical roots, unusual modernism, plentiful ideas and even a couple of killer pop songs ('Heavy Metal Drummer' and 'I'm The Man Who Loves You').
Alongside Lambchop's similarly audacious 'Is A Woman', 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot' provides an escape route from conservatism. And as smug little Ryan takes over the world, it's right in the nick of time.
