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Wilco plays the Fox
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
POP MUSIC REVIEW
Near the end of its set Thursday evening at the Fox Theatre, the Chicago art-rock band Wilco played a simple version of a simple song, “Passenger Side,� from its 1995 debut album, “A.M.�
With its acoustic base and ordinary shape, the song served as a reminder of how far this band has come in the last nine years. The rest of the show paralleled the rest of this band’s career — it was a searching, turbulent journey that seemed obsessed with finding order in chaos.
For much of the show, Wilco’s six members stood in a near-perfect rectangle. Their music, too, was geometric. Melodic lines traveled diagonally, then veered off at right angles. There were no smudges or smears; the parts were precise and distinct. Even when unleashing waves of distortion, the musicians exhibited a near-clinical control.
The central point in all of this was singer and guitarist Jeff Tweedy, the bandleader with the cigarette-stained voice and the restless sensibility. Tweedy’s band has undergone a comical series of lineup changes over the years, but he is a constant, and in his newest incarnation of Wilco he has found five other men capable of executing his vision.
Lasting just under two hours, the Fox show mostly dwelled on Wilco’s 2004 album, “A Ghost Is Born,� and on its prior release, 2002’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,� the CD that replaced the band’s early roots-rock affectations with white noise and space.
“Spiders (Kidsmoke),� a long song from the new record, alternated between crunchy electric guitar riffs and panicky stabs of distortion. The taut rocker “I’m A Wheel� came in a great rushing whoosh. “Jesus, etc,� a bouncy tune from “Yankee,� addressed the title subject as “honey,� revealing a playful side of Tweedy too often overlooked.
Elsewhere, Tweedy and his sidemen got serious about the noise. One favorite tactic was to let a conventional rock song disintegrate into a wash of dissonance. This was occasionally fascinating and occasionally frustrating. The musicians seemed to find it liberating, but Wilco mustn’t forget that even avant-garde moves, if repeated often enough, can become their own kind of cliché.
For visual accompaniment throughout the performance, the band relied upon a large video screen, upon which rolled images of various animals, including birds and, especially, insects. Though Wilco can at times seem inscrutable, the bugs seemed particularly appropriate metaphors for a multidimensional band that has come to view music through a compound eye.
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