Wilco
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Nonesuch Records

Hype already burbles around the long-delayed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the once-and-future record that would end Wilco's career, if such a thing could be dictated by their former label. Sometimes hype is nothing but blown smoke, and sometimes it grows out of earned enthusiasm. In a counter-intuitively canny move originally designed to thwart bootleggers, Wilco distributed mp3s of the songs via their website last fall, allowing plugged-in music fans to live with, love and tell all their friends about this record long before its release date.

Call it serendipity, but in YHF, Jeff Tweedy and his merry men have produced their best album to date. The songwriting is top-notch and emotionally engaging. Even the subdued moments boast melodies that invite almost instant sing-alongs. Whether he's delving into the demons that trouble our national psyche or tackling that hoariest of idioms, the love song, Tweedy spouts lyrics that connect, leaving a trail of slogans like "all my lies are only wishes" or "distance has no way of making love understandable" floating around the listener's skull.

While maintaining the flavors of folk and country that Tweedy's previous combo, Uncle Tupelo, helped revive in the underground, Wilco has quixotically insisted on a policy of constant change. They've segued from A.M.'s traditionalist country-rock through the sparser tones of the quasi-concept album Being There to the lush and refined, keyboard-heavy pure pop of Summerteeth. Along that progression, YHF is supposed to be their vaunted "experimental" album, for which they recruited avant gardist Jim O'Rourke to man the mixing board. Indeed, there are drones, bleeps, strange textures, bizarre mixes and song structures stretched to their breaking points, as on opener "I am Trying to Break Your Heart" and centerpiece "Ashes of American Flags."

Nonetheless, Wilco haven't come up with anything entirely new (just new for them), and to hang the "experimental" tag on YHF does a disservice to its breadth of styles and moods. "I'm the Man Who Loves You" gets by on an amiable back-porch, country-soul bounce stitched together with an overdriven Crazy Horse guitar line — not exactly anyone's idea of adventurous. It's equally hard to detect anything "out" about the string-enhanced, breezy "Jesus, etc." The gilded feedback, trilling guitar and strummy propulsion of "Pot Kettle Black" could, at a distance, be mistaken for a B-side by Kiwi indie poppers the Verlaines.

But lighter, straighter moments don't dominate the record, either. Instead, the play between the weird and the familiar is what makes YHF exceptional, as heard in the mid-record pairing of "Ashes of American Flags" and "Heavy Metal Drummer."

"Ashes" is the record's dark heart. It drifts along on an epic, truly spooky arrangement and has a dense set of lyrics documenting paranoia, disenfranchisement and the bankruptcy of the American Dream. This is hardly fluffy stuff; suffice to say that the climactic line, "I would like to salute/ the ashes of American flags," isn't a purely patriotic statement.

As the song fades out in a blend of harrowing sound effects, echoed, warped piano chords sneak in. These chords then form the basic theme to "Drummer," a rollicking, upbeat pop tune whose lyrics of "shiny, shiny pants/ and bleach blond hair/ a double kick-drum by the river in the summer," more than flirt with novelty. Tweedy has as much as labeled this tune his "dumb pop song," and it's impossible to argue that "Drummer" has anything on its mind. Even so, there's enough honesty to the wistful nostalgia the singer invests in the chorus, "I miss the innocence I've known/ playing KISS covers beautiful and stoned," to make the song as much a paean to lost youth as any kind of joke. And, while we weren't looking, Wilco has taken us from a cold corner of our collective nightmare to a spot in the sun of whatever hedonistic summer of love our memories hold.

— Wayne Lewis (capsighs@pacbell.net)