Wilco - Disc of the day

Wilco
A Ghost Is Born

(Nonesuch, 2004)

Chicago’s avant-pop stars’ fifth album from 2004. Recorded while Jeff Tweedy had some “issues”.

Emerging from rehab to promote this album, Jeff Tweedy reflected: “music has been the conflict-free zone in my life. I was just going about it in a lot of really destructive ways.” Granted, Tweedy’s self-medicating didn’t help, but if his decision to sack long-standing guitarist Jay Bennett after 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, recruit improv guitar maverick Nels Cline and go further into cahoots with experimental wizard Jim O’Rouke felt reckless at the time, then with hindsight those were risks well worth taking. Far from the sound of a breakdown, Ghost is an essentially well-rounded rock’n’roll record with enough personality tics to make it really interesting. It’s easy to imagine Jeff in the studio at all hours, hopped up on John Berryman poems and painkillers, envisioning a shining, silver devil in the atmospheric hush of Hell Is Chrome; being lost for hours in the meteoric clack of the ten-minute Spiders (Kidsmoke), where spiders sing in the salty breeze and fill out tax returns. And they’re just warming up for a trio of songs that are among the best Wilco have ever recorded: Muzzle Of Bees’ beautiful cyclical guitar wash, the bittersweet McCartney pop of Hummingbird and Handshake Drugs’ disoriented night out. Clarity and a clean bill of health for Tweedy would next bring us last year’s underrated Sky Blue Sky, but for my money A Ghost Is Born is equally undersung. A testimony to the benefits of occupational therapy, too.

Jenny Bulley

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 06/04/2008

Further Listening

Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Nonesuch)

The Beatles – Abbey Road (EMI)

Neil Young – Zuma (Reprise)

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Click here for House Rules

classic album

Posted by m f. vra at 6:46 AM GMT 06/04/2008 Report Abuse

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An amazing achievement, at times frightfully intimate and at others fearlessly panoramic. Essential '00s music.

Posted by Ange Tsibogiannis at 7:53 AM GMT 09/04/2008 Report Abuse

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i thought that was the LP of the year !

Posted by parman at 11:45 PM GMT 09/04/2008 Report Abuse

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