There are protest songs that rage with righteous fury. Then there are protest songs that merely gesture on the headlines, powerless and numb. “Ten Lifeless,” a glassy-eyed observe on Wilco’s Cousin, is the latter. Counting up the casualties, Jeff Tweedy decries the normalization of mass shootings: “Activate the radio, that is what they stated/No extra, no extra, not more than ten useless,” he murmurs as Nels Cline’s nimble jazz chords encompass and console him. Tweedy sounds extra weary than outraged (“Ten extra, 11 extra/What’s another to me?”) as a mud cloud of guitars commandeers the ultimate minute. Isn’t that the purpose, although? It’s exhausting not to really feel extra weary than outraged when listening to about one other bloodbath. The tune, to its credit score, indicts its personal shrug.
That is Wilco of their thirtieth yr: extra overtly political than ever—recall the double entendre of final yr’s long-winded Merciless Nation, with its patriot-baiting title observe—but musically extra introverted. Channeling weariness is what Wilco do finest lately, and on the refreshingly compact, fitfully stunning Cousin, weariness and uncertainty abound, elicited by violence, household (“Cousin”), and interpersonal relationships (“A Bowl and a Pudding”). After flirting with a youthful twang on Merciless Nation, Tweedy scarcely raises his voice above a involved hum. It’s a muted album about looking for connection amid decay, although it glints to life on a number of tunes that trace on the managed chaos of the much-mythologized Yankee Lodge Foxtrot/A Ghost Is Born period.
A lot as these albums benefited from the enter of an experimental interlocutor (the nice Jim O’Rourke), this one shakes up Wilco’s inside circle with outdoors producer Cate Le Bon, the Welsh songwriter, who squeezes some blood and guts out of those preparations: the turbulent build-up in “Ten Lifeless,” the splattery organ groans that improve the dirge-like “Pittsburgh.” Through the recording course of, Le Bon favored multitrack complexity over the live-in-the-studio strategy of Merciless Nation and inspired the band to take extra dangers. That comes by on opener “Infinite Shock,” which immediately seems like probably the most daring Wilco observe this aspect of “Artwork of Virtually.” Tweedy’s mantra-like repetitions (“It’s good to be alive/It’s good to know we die”) pair effectively with an ever-mutating symphony of synth shards and deconstructed guitar. As on lots of Wilco’s finest songs, Tweedy feels like he’s reaching for stability in a storm and it retains slipping simply out of attain.
A small bummer, then, that little else on Cousin summons that pressure. The album’s center stretch settles into an amiable midtempo blur. “Levee” and “Evicted” chug alongside on autumnal minor chords and local weather dread, however it’s exhausting to think about anybody however the realest Wilco heads differentiating them from listless deep cuts on Schmilco or Merciless Nation. “Daylight Ends” delivers one in every of Tweedy’s extra indirect love songs, however its twinkling folktronica by no means fairly lifts off. The beautiful “A Bowl and a Pudding” spins a brooding variation on the undulating arpeggios of “Muzzle of Bees,” whereas the title observe lastly summons some jagged edges and post-punk vigor. “The useless awake in waves!” Tweedy repeats on the tune’s snarling end.
