Album review: With “Schmilco,” Wilco repeats itself forgettably

Album review: With “Schmilco,” Wilco repeats itself forgettably

Why do people listen to Wilco? Since at least 2002, with the release of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” Wilco has been mining its particular vein of adroitly played acoustic instruments, inscrutable lyrics, and songs that don’t quite stick in your head past their next album. I mean, can you hum a Wilco song you’ve heard that’s been released in the last ten years?

There are several bands in the classic rock catalog — Aerosmith, AC/DC — who at some point or another began releasing pretty much the exact same album year after year, changing the song titles, swapping out one set of familiar lyrics for another, and helping fans maintain their belief that “new” music was being produced. One of the features that distinguishes Wilco from being lumped into this group is that the band happens to be very, very good with their instruments, and one senses that even if they are churning out music that sounds the same every time, they seem capable of much more.

None of this will be relevant to fans, of course, and “Schmilco,” which certainly deserves some kind of prize for best album title, is at least when being played a pleasant-sounding, professionally played, consistent record. But memorable? Not very.

The album kicks off with “Normal American Kids,” a song that evokes memories of bongs and jam bands and vans with carpeted interiors. It’s like a rejected theme song for “Stranger Things,” if the main characters were all dejected dads spending the weekend in their garages while their kids explored the upside-down universe. The interplay of guitars on “If I Ever Was a Child” evokes similar nostalgia but, strangely, also seems utterly fresh. (Again, not unlike “Stranger Things”!) The nostalgia is tinged, however, with hints of sadness as headman Jeff Tweedy sings about the “slump behind my brain.”

Sadness is, not surprisingly, the dominant tone of “Cry All Day,” a kind of road song for the heartbroken, and the band builds the song into an unamplified fervor, with Tweedy pointing the hole in his heart “into the light / into the light / into the light” at the song’s climax. It’s a great demonstration of the band’s collective abilities, honed over decades. “Schmilco” is the band’s 10^th album, and all the current members of the group have been around since at least 2005. Tweedy and bass player John Stirratt are the only remaining original members of the band, but there is no indication on the album that the band is nothing but absolutely polished. The real joy of this record is hearing how these guys play.

Tweedy’s singing is as jittery as always, but he seems relaxed and comfortable, stretching out his vocals as much as possible on songs like “Nope,” where he sounds like a thin-voiced John Lennon, or “Locator,” a song that builds to a climax that never comes. It’s the kind of song you might relate to better if you’ve ever forgotten your morning coffee, or your meds. I have no idea what the hell Tweedy is singing about, but that’s been the case with most of Wilco’s songs for the last decade or so.

Even with the occasional forays into Syd Barrett-like imagery, there are a few lyrical gems like the not-quite-nonsense phrases of “Someone to Lose” (“I hope you find / Someone to lose, someday”) or the ’80s wordplay of “We Aren’t the World” (“We aren’t the children”). But it’s hard to imagine that the words of these songs will mean anything to anyone. Do they need to? “I try, I huff and I puff,” Tweedy sings on “Just Say Goodbye,” the album’s final song. “Oh, as if I have the answers.”

If you’ve never heard a Wilco record before, I’d rate this one a 4-star effort, mostly for the solid instrumentation. If you’ve heard all or most of Wilco’s output so far and find yourself wondering if this latest one is worth the effort, you will be better off streaming it from somewhere. For the rest of us, this is probably the best Wilco album ever until the next one comes along. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but these songs are eminently forgettable.

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