Wilco
A Ghost Is Born
Nonesuch

The first thing that Wilco's newest album, A Ghost Is Born, calls to mind is Neil Young. Not only does the band owe a musical debt to Young, Wilco envelops Young's never-sell-out spirit in a bear hug. Jeff Tweedy's outfit will never be as prolific as Young, who has delivered 37 live and studio solo albums in 34 years. Its various members have proved, however, after five albums in nine years of work (and two celebrated collaborations with Billy Bragg), that they take their responsibilities as artists as seriously as ol' Transformer Man.

"You gotta keep changing," Young told Cameron Crowe in a 1975 Rolling Stone interview. "Shirts, old ladies, whatever. I'd rather keep changing and lose a lot of people along the way. If that's the price, I'll pay it. I don't give a shit if my audience is a hundred or a hundred million. It doesn't make any difference to me." Tweedy's dressing habits are unknown, but he's lost plenty of people along the way in his quest for change — Jay Farrar and Uncle Tupelo; Wilco members including Ken Coomer, Leroy Bach and Jay Bennett; and a record label, Reprise (Young's label, of course). The latter split has been stitched into the Wilco legend in countless articles, although James Hunter of the Village Voice dismissed it quite rightly as "at bottom, barely newsworthy everyday industry wrangling."

Sadly, the fallout with Reprise is too typical to be outlaw. It's in the mournful, captivating, meditative, exasperating, pretentious, masterfully constructed experience of A Ghost Is Born that Tweedy and Wilco become true iconoclasts. It establishes a sharp contrast between this and its previous, media-approved watershed album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (a great piece of work), serving notice that every Wilco album is potentially a completely different experience from the last, and the shape-shifting, if calculated, still has purpose and meaning.

So it is with the music. YHF, with a generous assist by Bennett, bursts with musical invention — sound layered on sound, every corner of space plugged with tape-loop manipulation, odd percussive flourishes and ethereal harmonies. Its production was algorithmic, with the problem of each song solved by consulting numerous musical beds (composed by Bennett) and winnowing down the possibilities until the right Turkish hand drum pulse fell correctly here, the acoustic guitar was slowed sufficiently to match the organ there, and so on.

O'Rourke and Kotche's higher profiles in the band might have resulted in a truly out-there album, something created with an eye toward a standing gig at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But this is Wilco, and with Wilco, there is melody. The surprise is that, in sessions aiming for improvisation and allowing the music to inform you, rather than the opposite, Tweedy's current occupations include Hunky Dory-era Bowie, Mott the Hoople, Harry Nilsson, the Buzzcocks, John Lennon, Big Star, even Seals and Crofts. And, of course, Neil Young.

"When I sat down on the bed next to you, you started to cry," begins "At Least That's What You Said," which establishes the album's tenor: a hushed, ambivalent vocal, a soft piano joining Tweedy's voice, a distant acoustic guitar and bits of odd noise lining the surface. "I said maybe if I leave you'll want me to come back home/ or maybe all you mean is leave me alone/ at least that's what you said." This quietly rendered opening gives way to a pounding, three-minute guitar solo, whose jagged edges and fumbling intensity sound so much like Young that it may as well be an outtake from "Down by the River." It's a great song, and it will become a favorite at live shows, if it isn't already.

The next two songs, "Hell Is Chrome" and "Spiders (Kidsmoke)," continue the pattern of muted opening minutes overcome by another impassioned solo (in the former song) and a barrage of guitar interrupting a hypnotic keyboard (in the latter). "Muzzle of Bees" sounds pleasingly lite-AM ready, and the dialogue between acoustic guitar picking and the sweet chime of piano is all Seals and Crofts.

Each song represents an attempt to build a naturalistic sound at its center, drawing your attention to peripheral pleasures, like an egg shaker in "Handshake Drugs" that anchors the percussion, a swooning bit of guitar feedback in "Wishful Thinking," a jaunty Anthony Newley thrum of piano on "Theologians" (which Tweedy aptly delivers with a simultaneously sharply enunciated and laidback élan, a specialty of Bowie's). "Hummingbird" could be track 13 on Randy Newman's 12 Songs: A bright, let's-start-the-show-kids piano gives way to a round of fiddles and slick, funky transitional drum kicks, as Tweedy implores someone, "Remember to remember me/ standing still in your past/ floating fast like a hummingbird." There's air and space in the songs, and the gridlocks of noise on YHF are now a distant hum, with the unfortunate exception of "Less Than You Think," which features a 12-minute tribute to the minimalist experimentations of Terry Riley appended to an otherwise solemn, earnestly delivered ballad. This unending rise and fall of found sound is meant to be an affirmation of the listener's freedom of choice; in other words, the listener is free to skip to the next track. Let's call it what it is: a self-important mistake.

The album is neatly book-ended with another Neil Young soundalike, "The Late Greats," whose premise is that the best music comes from the artist unsigned, unheard, unappreciated; in fact, as Tweedy sings, "The best song will never get sung/ the best life never leaves your lungs." The mercenary pulse of drums and guitar is all Neil, and a smash cut mid-song, from verse into bridge, is compliments of "Expecting to Fly." It's a satisfying end and fulfills the dialectic by which Wilco will no doubt continue to evolve, preserving a core of melody and conversational interplay among band members, while continuously subverting the presentation of its music. Tweedy can afford the burden of wanderlust, and not merely because his new label appreciates it. He is genuinely plugged into a mythology of popular music. He is not mythologizing the music loosely described as Americana, that Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks puzzled into the ground in the late '60s. On A Ghost Is Born, he connects directly, and pointedly, with the mythology of early '70s music, or that period of time when, as Fred Goodman details in his terrific book "The Mansion on the Hill," popular music lost its battle with commerce. Except, of course, for Neil Young.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)