4 stars
WILCO
Summer Teeth
Reprise, $16.99
``It's our beginning,'' sings Wilco vocalist Jeff Tweedy on the opening track of
``Summer Teeth.'' It's an appropriate introduction to the insurgent country band's
third, most stylistically diverse album yet, in stores Tuesday. Expanding on the pop
overtures of 1996's ``Being There,'' the new CD works both as a study in stylistic
departure and a narrative of emotional and professional endurance. ``Summer Teeth''
marks the end of a four-year coming of age for Wilco. Since rising from the ashes of
Uncle Tupelo with its 1995 debut ``A.M.,'' Wilco -- Tweedy, guitarist Jay Bennett,
bassist John Stirrat, drummer Ken Coomer and fiddler- steel
guitarist-multi-instrumentalist Max Johnson, who has since been replaced by Bob Egan
-- has toiled to transcend its parent band's legacy. With ``Summer Teeth,'' the group
proves that it can cast its own shadow. Recorded in Austin, Chicago and Champaign,
Ill., the album that Tweedy has termed ``weird'' finds Wilco splashing its luxuriant,
morose sensibilities onto a bright pop canvas, celebrating emotional trauma through
euphoric melodies and wry (and frequently funny) narratives of woe and longing.
A sense of rootless morbidity, propelled by hooky little choruses, permeates the
album's 15 songs. In ``Via Chicago,'' a narrator dreams of death and freedom and
finally of a homecoming; in the next track, ``ELT,'' he starts all over again, at once
wishing his lover dead and bemoaning his loneliness ``so far from home.'' Against a
backdrop of effervescent '60s pop, babbling water and twittering birds, the title
track sinks into a reverie on isolation and suicide. And while it's hard to top a line
like ``She's a jar with a heavy lid/ My pop-quiz kid'' (``She's a Jar'') for lilting
insouciance, the glee is tempered by a swooning synthesized string section and images
of ``skeletons with wings.'' In toto, the result is a sweet, doleful weave in which
keyboards, acoustic guitars and choppy distortion merge in sonic symbiosis, from the
Velvet Underground guitar riffs and nasal organ of ``I'm Always in Love'' to the
British invasion-era harmonies of ``Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again).''
``Pieholden Suite'' boasts a swanky brass section, and there's even a glimmer of
lounge jazz -- brushed cymbals and all -- in the jaunty ``When You Wake Up Feeling
Old.'' ``In a Future Age'' closes the album with the bittersweet and slightly maudlin
observation that ``some trees will bend/ And some will fall/ But then again/ So will
we all.'' Paired with the album's initial lines, it offers a fitting bookend for a
record that counters droll fatalism with the restless spirit of a veteran group
rediscovering the joy of taking baby steps into the sonic unknown.
Like every other ``alternative'' music form these days, the No Depression genre is so
entrenched in tradition that its wheels are spinning. Whether alt-country fans will
greet Wilco's new album as a betrayal of roots or a welcome infusion of new energy
remains to be seen.
The band has made its choice, and like its album's many narrators, it's already on the
move.
-- Neva Chonin
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POP CDs IN BRIEF
4 stars
JOE HENRY, Fuse, Mammoth, $15.98
Joe Henry is best known to scene-makers as Madonna's brother- in-law, a fact that
shouldn't be held against him. He's a quirky, world- weary singer and a songwriter
with a flair for appealingly disjointed lyrics and strong (if slightly dissonant)
melodies. ``Fuse'' boasts a stellar lineup, including Daniel Lanois and Jakob Dylan
and his fellow Wallflowers Rami Jaffee and Greg Richling, all adding their own
atmospheric touches to Henry's rueful pop miniatures. There are traces of the blues,
'60s spy-movie soundtracks, hip-hoppy modern rock, Tin Pan Alley and lounge guitar.
Still, Henry has put his own stamp on the proceedings, fleshing out his tales of
perplexed lovers with brilliant musical and lyrical flashes that bring to mind some
mutant blending of Hoagy Carmichael and Tom Waits.
-- j. poet
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2 stars
EMINEM, The Slim Shady LP, Aftermath/Interscope, $16.98
``God sent me to piss the world off,'' suggests the new hottest-rapper-on-the-planet
on the first track of his major-label debut. And he'll probably do just that. The
latest find from Dr. Dre, Detroit-bred Eminem (real name: Marshall Mathers) is a
facile freestyler who, in the guise of the title character Slim Shady, dishes a
profane, violent and irreverent world view that offers hard times as a justification
for his ``Just Don't Give a F--'' attitude. Some of ``Slim Shady's'' warped utterances
are truly funny in a dark, ``South Park''- ``There's Something About Mary'' kind of
way, but the album's length results in enough thematic repetition to blunt the attack.
-- Gary Graff
(personally, I thought the video was hilarious)
