Wilco : Cousin

Wilco have quietly and casually slipped into elder statesmen mode, putting out decent records every couple of years. Jeff Tweedy and company have locked into, while not auto pilot, something akin to safety mode. Gently strummed songs with Tweedy’s now hushed and whispered delivery. The band’s cache of musical wizards(Nels Cline, Pat Sansone, John Stirratt, and Mikael Jourgeson) add subtle flourishes to Tweedy’s skeletal folk to make them not quite experimental, but quietly ethereal.

The band has earned a little safety, having established themselves as one of the premier American rock bands in the late 90s/early 2000s. The run of albums that included Being There, Summerteeth, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and A Ghost Is Born set the stage for Jeff Tweedy to become one of our great American songwriters, an artist willing to deconstruct his creative process and rebuild it into something more abstract. And in the process, something timeless.

After a long string of records that saw the band going back and forth from wanting to make something bigger and then saying the hell with it and making more intimate albums, Wilco have just released possibly their best album in well over a decade. Cousin was produced by Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon, and LeBon adds a healthy dose of studio wizardry; taking advantage of the band’s Loft studio space to make something more experimental. Cousin sees Wilco return to fine, creative form.

From the start this feels like Wilco being deconstructed and rebuilt before our eyes and ears. The simplicity of last year’s Cruel Country, or the whispered experimental constraint of 2019s Ode To Joy are gone. In it’s place is the noisy Rorschach construct of “Infinite Surprise”, Cousin‘s opener. It’s ramshackle delivery feels like two or three songs meshed together, with Tweedy’s gentle vocal centering the mild aural insanity. It’s music chaos I can get behind. “Ten Dead” is a piano-led track with heavy-hearted melancholy as Tweedy talks about “ten dead”, touching on mass shootings in abstraction and ghostly simplicity. “Levee” jangles in spidery guitar lines, reminiscent of the Verlaine/Lloyd Television remembrance.

Cate Le Bon’s production is tight and precise, with every note, drum hit, and vocal flourish getting space in your head. Songs like the upbeat “Evicted” and the beautifully lush “A Bowl and A Pudding” come thru in stark musical colors, rooting in your head and heart immediately. The bratty title track has just the right amount of beauty and attitude.

Cousin is the first Wilco record in a very long time that sticks to your ribs, so to speak. It hangs out long after the last song ends, and begs for repeated listens. It’s a welcome return of one of America’s finest rock and roll bands.