Happy Monday, folks! I’m off in Ohio on Spring Break this week, but the internet is a greedy sonuvagun and demands content! And as it just so happens, I spent all last week doing a deep dive into the catalog of the band Wilco, so I thought I’d just rank their albums and judge all of them accordingly.
13. Cruel Country: It’s not a bad album, per se, nor is it a return to the alt-country of their earliest days. It’s a latter-day Wilco album, with all that entails: excellent instrumentation played by consummate professionals, while Jeff Tweedy mumbles and croons over it all. It’s good, just not as good as some of their other stuff.
12. AM: Their first album, which really just feels like Uncle Tupelo 2.0. The sound is rough and ragged and the songs aren’t nearly as finished as you’d like them to be. There’s some bright spots here and there – “Passenger Side” remains a personal favorite – but it’s not anything like what the band became.
11. Star Wars: Even though it combines three of my favorite things (the cat on the cover, the title, and the band Wilco), I’m not a huge fan of this album. My biggest complaint about it is that it feels too tossed off and too self-serious at the same time. It’s like Wilco trying to reclaim their art-rock credentials, but also it sounds like they were just freeform jamming in the studio.
10. Cousins: It’s another latter-day Wilco album that I just…don’t really remember after I’ve listened to it. It’s good, it’s pleasant and all, but I don’t remember a single song off this one.
9. Schmilco: Wilco still trying to recapture that art-rock cred, but at least this time their sense of humor is intact and the songs feel more fleshed out than on Star Wars.
8. Ode To Joy: Here we go. From here forward, we start getting into the solid albums, the ones really worth listening to. Ode To Joy finds the band balancing their artier pretensions with good, solid songcraft. They use weirdness in service to the songs. Tunes like “Quiet Amplifier” and “Everyone Hides” are damn good. If I was going to pick a latter-day Wilco album to start with, this would be it.
7. Being There: Yeah, it’s probably blasphemy to put this one in the middle of the list, and the double album is where Wilco starts to coalesce into a band rather than a jumble of musicians banging away on their instruments, but there’s a lot of filler on these two discs. They could’ve had a stone-cold classic if they’d edited it down to just a single LP. That being said, “Misunderstood,” “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” “Red-Eyed And Blue,” “Say You Miss Me,” “Sunken Treasure,” and “Dreamer In My Dreams” are all outstanding songs that showcase what Tweedy and the band could do.
6. Wilco (the album): When you kick off your self-titled album with a self-titled track, the oroboros that you have become is finally complete. There are some bangers on here, though, such as “One Wing” and “You Never Know,” and “Sonny Feeling” is a great travelogue song.
5. The Whole Love: The title track alone makes this album worth the price of entry. The fact that you also get great songs like “I Might” and “Capitol City,” or “Dawned On Me” and “Open Mind,” or the trippy opener “Art of Almost” (with a great freakout coda at the end) is just icing on the delicious cake.
4. Sky Blue Sky: When this album first came out, three years after A Ghost Is Born, I felt…let down. It wasn’t nearly as inventive or experimental or exciting as the previous album. It was just…dad rock. Sure, the songs were pleasant and well-constructed, and the band were in fine form, but it just didn’t click with me. I’m happy to say it clicks now, and tracks like “You Are My Face” or “Hate It Here” could’ve fit alongside anything from Ghost and been perfectly acceptable. There isn’t a bad song on here, and the penultimate song, “What Light,” might be one of the best, sweetest songs Tweedy’s ever written.
3. A Ghost Is Born: While it’s probably my personal favorite Wilco album, I’m not crazy enough to believe that it’s their best. There are too many weird detours – “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” is just too damn long, and “Less Than You Think” just drones on for what feels like an eternity – but the songs that hit really hit. Opener “At Least That’s What You Said” starts out quiet and moody, then breaks out into a Neil Young and Crazy Horse exercise. There’s a string of songs in the middle of the album – “Muzzle of Bees,” “Hummingbird,” and “Handshake Drugs” – that feels so absolutely perfect that I cannot imagine any other sequence of songs ever being that right again. Then there’s the one-two punch of “Theologians” and “The Late Greats” on either side of “Less Than You Think.” They’re uptempo and bouncy and just fun. This is a Serious BandTM, but they know how to have fun and cut loose.
2. Summerteeth: Everyone goes through a Beach Boys phase, right? Except most of us don’t turn that phase into one of the best albums of the ’90s. This is one of those all-killer, no-filler albums (well, except for maybe “Pieholden Suite” and “Via Chicago,” but I’m entitled to my opinions and you’re entitled to yours) that you can just put on and listen to all the way through, and when it reaches the end, you just flip the album over and start it again from the top. This is the band realizing its potential, and everything comes up aces.
1. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: If Summerteeth is the band realizing their potential, YHF is Wilco surpassing every expectation. It’s the perfect distillation of Americana and alt-country or whatever else you want to call it. It’s the American experience, grappling with life in a post-9/11 world, searching for meaning and reason in a world without either. It’s a perfect album.
Charlie Cottrell 