IN REVIEW: Wilco - "Schmilco"

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"At the moment I'm bored," sings Jeff Tweedy a little over ten minutes into his group's tenth album, and boy do they sound it. Schmilco is a sharp 180 from the restless and electric Star Wars; this, by contrast, is a record that presents the band at its most subdued, rarely rising above a breezy acoustic murmur. Even when it does get weirder and louder (as on Common Sense, the song referenced above), it's half-assed; the anti-soloing and off-kilter beat sound more like a band just recording whatever instead of the band that used to inject tension and dread into their experiments. There are a handful of decent songs here, and none left me totally cold, but there just isn't anything on this record that stands up to the trilogy of records released during their artistic peak (1999-2004). Hell, there isn't even anything that stands up to the three records they released after that. That's not to say the new songs are out-and-out bad, but I doubt any of them stand a chance of making most Wilco fans' personal top twenty list. Schmilco isn't a terrible album (I don't truly believe they're capable of that); however, the lack of ambition, energy and memorable songs dooms Schmilco to a terrible fate: it has a very real chance of going down in history as Wilco's worst album.

September 9, 2016 • dBpm/Anti-
Highlights If I Ever Was a Child • Someone to Lose • Happiness

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