Who is popular today?

(dBpm Records)Jeff Tweedy and co’s 13th album bears a close family resemblance to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but with Cate Le Bon in the producer’s chair, it has an appealing wash of left-field weirdness and its lyrics express an older man’s anxietiesYou could read a lot into the fact that the opening track of Wilco’s 13th album, Infinite Surprise, also provided the album’s working title. Its predecessor, the double Cruel Country, felt like a comforting retreat in the aftermath of Covid, and an embrace of the alt-country tag that frontman Jeff Tweedy had gone out of his way to avoid since Wilco’s inception, having helped define the genre with his previous band Uncle Tupelo. Infinite Surprise, however, suggests things are moving forward again. As does the presence of an outsider in the producer’s chair: Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, clearly employed to shake things up in much the same way Sonic Youth alumnus Jim O’Rourke did on 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and 2004’s A Ghost Is Born, albums which earned Wilco the unwanted soubriquet of “America’s Radiohead”. A generation younger than the band (her parents were fans and, delightfully, when she accepted the job, Tweedy suggested she text her dad to tell him), Le Bon attracted their attention with a radical, angular deconstruction of A Ghost Is Born’s Company in My Back for a heritage rock magazine’s tribute CD.That Le Bon has reawoken Wilco’s arty, experimental side is clear from the start: while Cruel Country opened with an acoustic guitar strumming an old-timey waltz pattern, Infinite Surprise begins with a burst of gauzily abstract, echo-saturated guitar and grumbling distortion which starts so suddenly it’s as if someone has hit the record button in the middle of something. A sweet, sad song gradually forms, driven by a relentless mechanised ticking and occasional blasts of percussive noise in lieu of a drum track. It twice threatens to reach a crescendo: the first time it dissolves into dizzy, shoegaze-y guitar; the second, it fades away completely and is replaced by crackling static. Continue reading...