Wilco - Sky Blue Sky

Oh god Spiders is the best best best thing they ever did. And even then I remember playing the album version the first time it leaked and going 'what they fuck is going on' after hearing how they had played it before

I revisited Ghost for the first time in a few years and was startled by how … antiseptic it felt

(For the most part anyway)

so precise, and tiring?

"spiders" is one of the best tracks on a ghost is born. the drone on "less than you think" which is the only other long track is indeed self-indulgent nonsense though

i am boring and still think yhf and then summerteeth are their best. they're much more colourful records, losing bennett really seemed hurt their arrangements & having both him & o'rourke around on yhf went a long way to making it what it is.

just revisited sbs and my opinion on it hasn't really changed, the general mood & playing are lovely but around half of the songs are just sort of there, they don't all grab me in the way their best work does. still, the good stuff here is very very good

failed to mention that my diminishing appreciation for "spiders" stems from hearing the pre-studio live recordings (which i didn't hear until much later). studio version still decent, but makes me wonder why they changed the arrangement so much.

I remember hearing Spiders as the more conservative tune it began as, and then it transformed gradually towards the more familiar version. I got to see them, for the second time since the Summerteeth tour, at the Glastonbury 2004 early afternoon slot when largely they remained unknown (in the UK) except for a couple of hundred people down the front. That Spiders (full-blown Neu! arrangement) was absolutely sublime, I was already very much getting into the album version, but by then I was inarguably won over. It will always be my favourite Wilco song. They won't play it at the very rare UK shows I get to see these days, they always appear to field off a request with a quick Bull Black Nova up their sleeves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sorry I wrote that as a 12 year old school holiday report love them though

Being There is still my go to

yeah, i'm a YHF, Being There and A.M. guy. then probably Summerteeth and Star Wars.

absolutely wore Being There out when I got it. I think for free after it was a rarely or probably never played promo-disc at the mall cd store I worked in at the time.

that run from BT>Summerteeth>YHF was my jam but honestly don’t pull them out much these days.

Yeah, it's almost as if there was something to the notion that Bennett was key, hmm. Anyway, me too, BT/Summerteeth/YHF, I love them all and yet they're all still better than I remember them when I put them on.

one of these threads made me get out those first two Golden Smog albums recently. Still pretty great and much more engaging than I ever found the 3 or so 90s era Jayhawks’ LPs I owned to be (which are still totally fine and good IMO)

Bennett was key

There's a Jay Bennett doc floating around out there somewhere, definitely will be checking that out.

I'm reluctant to call Being There a great album - it's really enjoyable in small doses, but too many tracks seem to carry the same chord changes and that gets old pretty fast. I want to say it should've been a single album rather than a double, but regardless it was a great starting point (A.M. feels like they're still getting it together), and they just blew up into a great band after that. Every album from Mermaid Avenue to YHF shows remarkable growth - they're all great albums to me, and the first Mermaid Avenue and YHF are my two favorites, the ones I play most. A Ghost Is Born loses a little something and like I mentioned I tweaked it for my own listening, but it still feels like a commendable follow-up to YHF. The first live album is great too. If I had to make a case for them being one of the great bands in rock, it would be based on those ten years.

i've always chuckled that being there ended up being able to fit on a single disc after all.

but yeah, it's really good — while it's playing. i still think about that transition point in "sunken treasure" at about the three minute mark ("i am so out of tune . . .") with a lot of reverence. but beyond that song, i don't really remember it unless it's playing.

Summerteeth was the biggest jump imo

Wilco is Too earnest for my taste but I do like golden smogs note for note cover of glad and sorry

xp or their biggest transition? i think if you're following Tweedy from the Uncle Tupelo years, Being There is a sort of pinnacle for his alt country sound. I'd say the same for Jay and Trace

half of being there is excellent and the other half ranges from not my thing to dull

re same chords changes on Being There—yep totally. I don’t hate it though. kinda gives it a thematic Red-Headed Stranger bine

Being There (the prototypically erratic double album) is pretty clearly where everything goes widescreen. Power-pop, country, Grateful Dead, Big Star's "Third," etc. Then "Summerteeth" is where it goes Technicolor. "YHF" is where it all falls apart (by deconstructed design). "Ghost" is where even a great band can't quite make up for Tweedy shouldering all the songwriting in addition to a pill addiction. Everything after that is pretty clear-eyed and consistent, and often kind of safe, but there are plenty of weird detours to be found.

vibe*
Xpost

(Speaking of Golden Smog's Faces cover, I literally only learned a week or two ago that "Bad Time" by the Jayhawks is actually a Grand Funk cover. I had no idea!)

idk I'm the boring dude who says exposure to Billy Bragg + Guthrie tightened them

Lotta fingers in that particular pie.

what i really miss from summerteeth/yhf is the power-pop influence, the tight pop hooks they used to have. it seems like bennett really helped push things in that direction, and then without him around tweedy's interests were firmly elsewhere after yhf.

Yeah, I miss that power pop element too. It's even there on Mermaid Avenue Vol. II:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQhk__Ti3pc

it's really just that the guitar on this record is so fucking amazing, every song's horizons are extended by some sick guitar part

The power pop appeared to come back on the uptempo songs from The Whole Love (and perhaps on You Never Know) but I couldn't help wondering what Jay would have brought to them

It feels like Jeff has fallen back to writing every song in first position on the guitar which to me is making so much of his recent output sound so samey. He's clearly happier keeping vocal pitching fairly low and hushed too

Rather than retread old ground, these days I'd just be keen to hear someone come up with some more interesting (and lively) chord changes here and there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5tmVsUKCiY

this 8 minute "impossible germany" rules

Just fired this up

So far: I can totally understand why the me of 2007 loathed this. It’s still not high in my overall Wilco estimation but after a long day of middle management it’s nice enough.

“Glass of white wine, middle-aged, home alone on a weeknight” Wilco

Otherwise known as Chillco

(I’m not making fun of it anymore than I’m making fun of myself at this age)

Oh right, “Leave Me” was always such a pretty song.

In conclusion: I’m in a mellower place with SBS but it’s still not The Wilco Album I Reach For Automatically.

i think Sky Blue Sky is vastly underrated. i felt it was an album that had Wilco hit their stride. i understand that is not like by most of their older fans but think it is their lost. it really has some of their more solid songs but most people just say that it's dad rock, so whatever.

― Bee OK, Wednesday, May 6, 2009 9:11 PM (twelve years ago)

i pretty much stand by that and i have been wanting to listen to this present day to see how i feel

good revival series for Wilco Brad, it has been fun to read #originalthread

i just remembered that years back when i worked at my college radio station we got the promo copy. i let my grad colleague hear it first because he'd been a bigger wilcohead and his immediate review was so lackluster that i'd never heard the album. what are the best YHF/AGIB type tracks?

none of it really sounds much like yhf but none of it is too far from most of the mellower tracks on agib. just listen to "impossible germany"

it's not the most agib-like track (idk which is exactly) but it's the album's defining moment

Do they ever not play Impossible Germany outside of album shows?

I don't know if this is their best record (probably Mermaid Avenue for me) but it's the only one I still listen to, and didn't get bored of.

This post was OTM

Oh man, why can't the whole album sound like the middle two minutes of 'You Are My Face'? Christ, why couldn't the whole of 'You Are My Face' sound like that?
― G00blar, Monday, March 12, 2007 1:13 AM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Do they ever not play Impossible Germany outside of album shows?

I'm not sure about more recently, but it did get played outside of album shows now and then. The band recently issued a box set of shows from the Capitol Theatre from 2014 where it was played.

they haven't played it at every show ever since its release but it's pretty close

possible and likely at every show

I got the impression it has got to the stage where there'd be riots if they didn't