As anyone who's followed their career for the past eight years (from "Being There" anyway) will know, WILCO have consistently been one of the most innovative bands from either side of the Atlantic with an apparently insatiable desire to reinvent themselves as they've gone along.
This side of the millennium they've recorded two consistently jaw-dropping albums in "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" and "A Ghost Is Born" which have seen them slip their Americana-based moorings and drift into considerably more volatile Alt.Rock straits. Both records were made during lengthy periods of trauma for the band ("YHF" before, during and after major personnel upheavals and a difficult parting of the ways with original label Reprise Records and "Ghost" on the back of Tweedy's spell in rehab following an addiction to painkillers), but both have seemingly revitalised the band.
These are the records that form the backbone of "Kicking Television": that rarity of rarities: the crucial live album, featuring a consistently brilliant 23 tracks recorded live at Chicago's Vic Theatre spread across 2 CDS. It's a record that both bleeds emotion and has the courage of its' convictions to jump sonic ravines and showcases the fact that Wilco's current line-up (Nels Cline, Mikael Jorgensen and Pat Sansome augmenting core trio of Jeff Tweedy, bassist John Stirratt and drummer Glenn Kotche) is surely their best yet.
It's fitting though, that Wilco choose "Misunderstood" from "Being There" to open the set with. In a sense it's the key Wilco track because it's the one that demonstrated at the time that Tweedy and co were capable of thinking and operating way beyond the confines of Alt.Country and the bruised bar-room rock of their heroes The Replacments and The Stones. This version of it is highly charged, and goes from hangdog, through tongue-in-cheek ("You still love rock'n'roll" sings Tweedy to huge cheers) to abject melancholy and builds up a potent electric firestorm along the way.
Stunning stuff, and it's soon cemented by tracks like "Company In My Back" and "Shot In The Arm" - both delivered with anthemic magic - and "The Late Greats",which matches a nicely sardonic Tweedy lyric ("So good you'll never know, they never even played a show/ can't hear 'em on the radio") with a jaunty performance by the band and a judicious use of feedback. "Handshake Drugs", meanwhile, once again reinforces its' claim as a hidden classic in the Wilco canon, building up to a wicked and deafening climax after a poppy start.
Perhaps inevitably, though, it's the songs from "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" that hit home with the most resonance. It's hard enough imagining a band having the gall and confidence to even think of playing a song like "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart" live, never mind actually delivering a version complete with the angularity, experimentation and emotional meltdown of its' recorded counterpoint more than wilfully intact. That's the ante upped, but a sublimely moving "Jesus, Etc" tops it, and a playful, funky and exhilarating "I'm The Man Who Loves You" ensures you're smiling from ear to ear once again. Hell, even the token dumb-ass punk of the closing "Kicking Television" sounds heroic in Wilco's capable hands.
|
Take that, CD2, you'd think, but as soon as the dreamlike menace of "Via Chicago" drifts in, you know the band have no intention of taking their collective feet off the gas. Bearing in mind they're on home turf, a song named "Via Chicago" is hardly liable to miss the target, but when Tweedy sings the intro lines "I dreamed about killing you again last night and it felt alright to me" and Nels Cline unleashes that siren's song of a lap steel part then you can tangibly feel the shivers starting down your spine.
Touche. And with a graceful "Hummingbird", a subtle and folksy "Muzzle Of Bees" (which also has room for some jarring post-rock guitar) and a surprise - and improved - busk through the Woody Guthrie-penned "Airline To Heaven" - show us that Wilco have no intention of letting their back catalogue rest on its' laurels.
Besides, they still have a final stretch in reserve that most bands would maim for. Again, there's a killer triumvirate from "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" involved, as a stirring "Ashes Of American Flags" ("I wonder why we listen to poets when nobody gives a fuck") is followed by a wonderful and immediate "Heavy Metal Drummer" and - of all things - "Poor Places" which (yup) ends with an equally deafening scree of white noise/ conar radio signals as it does on the album. Instead of a lovely "Reservations", though, it segues into a charged "Spiders(Kidsmoke)" where the song's sinew-y, Can-esque momentum is interrupted by three of those magnificent monitor-mounting stadium-riff sections. It must be an absolute blast to belt out live and as it finally winds down, Tweedy - who's stage patter is minimal, save for the odd witty aside - is clearly tired and emotional in the best possible way.
They leave us with Tweedy enthusing "Oh, it's been such a wonderful evening...we've laughed, we've cried, we've bled" and ushering the band into the pretty, "Music From Big Pink"-style creep of Charles Wright cover "Comments" to send us home. It's a hell of a way to go, but then "Kicking Television" is a live album of rare quality. It's got moments to stop you in your tracks, moments where the tears well up, moments when you strap on the air guitar and pose unashamedly, moments when you're beaten and broken, bits where you chuckle and moments when you're simply lost in the thrill of it all. It's a great celebration of one of America's very best bands and the one live album from 2005 you really, really need. No kidding.
|
