A Ghost Is Born is all over the place. There are some good songs, mind you. But they're spattered amongst some very mediocre alt-noodling tripe.
Then there's the fifteen minute wank-out of industrial noise that is Less Than You Think. Well, I'm afraid that's not music. No matter what some dandruff flecked hipster tries to tell you.
Come to think of it, if you exclude my favourite album, Summerteeth, Wilco have a very patchy body of work, indeed. But that's just me; I'm sure they'll continue to garner critical acclaim. No matter how undue that acclaim is.
At the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's non-traditional 2001 "release," I was in the midst of a two-year exile away from the home city I share with the band. While the rock-crit throngs lined up to praise the album's experimentalism, screw-the-Record-Company-Man martyrdom and accidental 9/11 relevance, it merely seemed to me like a postcard photograph that perfectly sums up all the things you love about a city, a sonic map of Chicago's every contour. Putting YHF on the stereo was all it took to cue up a mental slideshow of the city's palette: "Reservations" the gray tones of a frozen-over Lake Michigan, "Heavy Metal Drummer" the humid orange of a Grant Park festival, and "Radio Cure" the brown shade of El-track alleys.
It's very possible, then, that the underwhelming feeling projected by A Ghost Is Born is linked to my address being restored to a Chicago zip code, where I have the city's essence accessible right outside my courtyard gate. Early returns on the album veer wildly from rapturous proclamations that this record solidifies the band's genius to cred-snipers who see it as a crippling failure. To me, it sounds like neither extreme, but rather like a band in need of a break, a band that's been reading their press, a band straying too far from their strengths, and a band that's still too good to let any of these things completely obscure their talents.
AGB Rating - Credit
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