You could read a lot into the fact that the opening track of Wilco’s 13th album, Infinite Surprise, also provided the album’s working title. Its predecessor, the double Cruel Country, felt like a comforting retreat in the aftermath of Covid, and an embrace of the alt-country tag that frontman Jeff Tweedy had gone out of his way to avoid since Wilco’s inception, having helped define the genre with his previous band Uncle Tupelo. Infinite Surprise, however, suggests things are moving forward again. As does the presence of an outsider in the producer’s chair: Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, clearly employed to shake things up in much the same way Sonic Youth alumnus Jim O’Rourke did on 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and 2004’s A Ghost Is Born, albums which earned Wilco the unwanted soubriquet of “America’s Radiohead”. A generation younger than the band (her parents were fans and, delightfully, when she accepted the job, Tweedy suggested she text her dad to tell him), Le Bon attracted their attention with a radical, angular deconstruction of A Ghost Is Born’s Company in My Back for a heritage rock magazine’s tribute CD.
That Le Bon has reawoken Wilco’s arty, experimental side is clear from the start: while Cruel Country opened with an acoustic guitar strumming an old-timey waltz pattern, Infinite Surprise begins with a burst of gauzily abstract, echo-saturated guitar and grumbling distortion which starts so suddenly it’s as if someone has hit the record button in the middle of something. A sweet, sad song gradually forms, driven by a relentless mechanised ticking and occasional blasts of percussive noise in lieu of a drum track. It twice threatens to reach a crescendo: the first time it dissolves into dizzy, shoegaze-y guitar; the second, it fades away completely and is replaced by crackling static.
It offers a handy primer in the album’s sound. The rest of Cousin isn’t quite so hazy, though the fabulously disorientating A Bowl and a Pudding comes close: ominous strings, a folky fingerpicked guitar pattern that gradually takes on a hypnotic quality, what appear to be two lead vocals running out of phase with each other. But even the more straightforward tracks come with a subtly appealing wash of weirdness. Ten Dead is lent a sense of unease by the eerie string arrangement and the noise that grumbles softly in the background. You might compare the sound of the slide guitars on Evicted to those on George Harrison’s early 70s albums, if they weren’t doused in so much reverb as to give them a spectral cast. Even Soldier Child, perhaps the most direct track here, has a slightly hesitant, stumbling quality to its twangy guitar solo, and a gently woozy moan about the synthesisers that lurk far back in the mix.
Bursts of static and noise, guitar sounds that join the dots between the swoop of the pedal steel and the sickly, warped, eerie electronics: you could mount an argument that all this isn’t a million miles from the sound of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but Cousin nevertheless seems like a markedly different album from its lauded ancestor. For one thing, there are moments that feel entirely out of left-field for Wilco. The title track is choppy and vaguely Talking Heads-esque. Sunlight Ends is deliberately rough-hewn and demo-like, with the stop-start beat punched out by a drum machine, a complex guitar line fluttering over it not entirely in rhythm, the bass slightly out of tune.
Moreover the overall sound, with its blurs and hesitancies and moments of fragility and collapse, fits with the album’s mood: no one comes to a Wilco album looking for carefree emotional uplift, but the anxieties expressed here feel different, very much the product of a writer 20 years older than the author of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. “I love to take my meds, like my doctor said,” Tweedy sings on Levee before going on to probe the boundaries of a longterm relationship: what if, after all this time, your partner finally has enough of dealing with your problems and frailties? There is a brutal honesty about the weariness with which Ten Dead greets the news of another mass shooting: “10 more, 11 more, what’s one more to me?” sings Tweedy. It doesn’t feel angry so much as crushed by the grinding inevitability of it all. His immediate reaction to hearing the news on waking is a desire to go straight back to bed.
Cousin isn’t a completely unprecedented left turn but nor is it a straightforward reanimation of past glories. It’s something else; an album that feels simultaneously familiar and different, satisfying and disquieting. Here is a band still moving forward in their own peculiar way 30 years into their career, which is an infinite surprise in itself.
This week Alexis listened to
Bar Italia – My Little Tony
A killer opening line – “Your pretentious ways make me die a little” – plus edge-of-chaos sound, like Automatic-era Jesus and Mary Chain playing in a lock-up garage. Splendid.
