![]() “10 Dead” joins the sorry jukebox of mass-shooting meditations. “Evicted” is an unusually celebratory song about owning your fuck-ups and their consequences. “I love to take my meds/ Like my doctor said,” he sings on “Levee,” a sorta-kinda love song about a relationship that might or might not represent salvation. “A Bowl and A Pudding” is a dubby Nick Drake fever dream “Pittsburgh” suggests the Incredible String Band tripping in a steel mill.īut part of Wilco’s magic is its mutability (“They can be anything,” Le Bon noted admiringly), and how artfully it always cleaves to Tweedy’s narrative voice, one of the most companionable in modern song, even when he’s channeling flawed characters, which he frequently is. But her musicianship shadows the curveball melodies and clipped watchmaker beats scattered through Cousin - a fairly sharp pivot from the flashback country-rock Americana of last year’s excellent Cruel Country, more often conjuring angular Anglo post-punk and old-school Canterbury Scene prog-rock. Given her wickedly Nico-esque 2019 cover of Wilco’s “Company in My Back,” one might wish her vocals were more prominent. Like a number of Wilco jams, it’s a perfect song about imperfection. On the opener, “Infinite Surprise,” tick-tocking percussion clocks a cardiac bass drum, as Tweedy freeze-frames two souls gazing into each other’s eyes (or maybe one non-binary soul and a mirror) in a moment of uneasy, helpless communion, guitar noise and synth detritus thickening and receding like wildfire smoke. So LeBon and Tweedy are a good match, and maybe because we’re all swimming in strangeness lately, even Cousin’s more abstract fusions feel utterly natural. Tweedy’s a plainspoken dude whose avant-gardening, despite rangy sidemen like Glen Kotche and Nels Cline, has occasionally come off more aspirational than constitutional. She does weird well, because her oddball pop always feels rooted in the heart. The producer is Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, who clicked with the band at Solid Sound, Wilco’s biennial Massachusetts music’n’art kegger. ![]()
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