Album review: Cousin, by Wilco, has Jeff Tweedy and co in fine form
Wilco have released new album, Cousin. Picture: Peter Crosby
★★★★☆
Jeff Tweedy and his band Wilco were full of enthusiasm when they recently headlined the Sounds from A Safe Harbour festival at Cork Opera House. It’s clearly a productive period for a group that first broke through in 1999 with the acclaimed Summerteeth, only to fall foul of their record label three years later with the more experiential Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Cousin exists between those two poles. It’s catchy and often very warm but full of the avant-garde wrinkles that have led critics to herald the Chicago outfit America’s answer to Radiohead.
Tweedy has never stopped thinking outside the box. He continues here by working with Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon, who produces the project.
Le Bon has a talent for balancing beautiful melodies with challenging music in her solo work. That is likewise the case on Cousin, which opens with the hazy, glitchy Infinite Surprise.
Surf guitars and wafting feedback suggest a difficult listen – but then, in sweeps Tweedy’s warm, affable voice. Suddenly the tune veers in a completely different direction, shooting for a cuddly dad rock that feels just a few steps removed from the comforting middle-age angst of The National.
A wonderful country lilt meanwhile characterises 'Ten Dead', where bleak lyrics - “Ten dead, ten dead…now there are ten dead” – are juxtaposed with Tweedy’s lived-in croon and a spiral of alt-country guitar.
Cousin isn’t the sort of record to knock anyone’s blocks off. The material is hushed, and even when it opens up to something more expansive – such as on post-rock throbber, 'Pittsburgh' - it remains rooted in an autumnal melancholia.
That’s no bad thing. Not every album has to shake the listener by the lapels. And while Cousin is in places wonderfully wonky, the last thing it wants to do is frighten the horses.
It’s the balm after the storm– and a bonus treat for anyone who caught Wilco in Cork or Dublin recently.
