At this point in Wilco's 15-year history, the band have been a
lot of things, all of them sort of nebulous: alt-country,
Americana, neo-folk, quasi-experimental, and, if you insist,
"dad rock." Miraculously, the disparate strains within the
group's catalog have somehow flowed together into a unifying
aesthetic, largely due to Jeff Tweedy's distinctive singing
voice and remarkable consistency as a songwriter. Though their
previous releases, particularly the schizoid A Ghost Is Born,
have embraced this eclecticism, the band's seventh proper LP,
Wilco (The Album), does just what the title implies, and
consolidates their style into a coherent statement of identity.
This is something of a mixed blessing. Though Wilco (The Album)
is a good, concise distillation of the band's strengths, it is
not their best work, mainly because it lacks the audacity of
their four previous efforts. The group's 2000s output thrived on
Tweedy's restlessness and perversity, as if each song were
penned in part to challenge the preconcep