Wilco
Wilco - A Ghost Is Born

On “Handshake Drugs,” a vicious hook of a vocal melody emerges over a T. Rex groove. But as the song progresses, luscious, droning sheets of sound become increasingly prominent, resonating from the speakers as if plucked straight from composer Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room.” In 1969, Lucier recorded himself reading the following statement, which partially explains his experiment: “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech…” It sounds like Wilco has borrowed this technique—recording a voice and then recording the recording, over and over, until the words have been eroded, taking them beyond language, meaning and nuance and reducing them to simple vibrations. There’s something downright haunting about this—a sonic ghost floating above the music.

As the other-worldly outro of “Handshake Drugs” fades into “Wishful thinking,” it seems as if you’re sucked inside the tubes and wires of an amplifier—a rock ’n’ roll Alice In Wonderland dwarfed by a gigantic reverb coil as one of Tweedy’s simple-yet-profound lyrics filters through: “What would we be without wishful thinking?”

But if any tune on this record’s going to generate heated discussion it’s the somber “Less than you think.” Like the aforementioned Lucier piece, the lyrics reference the musical experiment to come. “Lightly tapping / It’s high-pitched and it hums / Your spine starts to shine / And you shiver at your soul.” It’s as if the song was written in the wake of one of Tweedy’s notorious migraine’s. After a short section of piano, vocals, acoustic guitar and hammered dulcimer, it begins. Twelve minutes of slowly building, uninterrupted, high-frequency static hum. The sound of rushing electricity. It’s like Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire—an 8-hour-long, stationary shot of the Empire State Building. Birds occasionally fly by, and at six-and-a-half hours (what some conisder the climax) the floodlights illuminating the building go out.

Manipulating a sea of synthesizers, loops and filters, Wilco forges on into the sonic depths. A low rumble echoes below the hum. Shaking sheet-metal movie thunder. We are inside Jeff Tweedy’s headache. After six minutes, a sound resembling electronic crickets becomes prominent. Three more minutes pass and what sounds like a high-powered dental drill emerges. But how many people will bother listening to this when, at the touch of a button, they can skip to the next track? Some will even feel insulted they paid to hear this unlistenable noise. What does something like this accomplish? Well, it’s got me writing, you reading and hopefully all of us thinking about art. What are the boundaries? Should they even exist? If this is music, is dumping a can of paint on the sidewalk art?” Can one word be a poem? How about a blank sheet of paper? Like John Cage’s “4’33”—where the performer sits onstage in silence, occasionally turning through pages of sheet music—the listener’s mindset, environment and reaction will become an inseparable part of this piece. Certainly, there’s more here than meets the eye… or is there? With the song’s last line Tweedy slyly undercuts himself before the ensuing cacophony: “There’s so much less / To this than you think.”

Maybe, less pretentiously, this lengthy segment of noise has more to do with the old rock ’n’ roll adage Steppenwolf illustrated so perfectly on “Magic Carpet Ride.” Would the song’s monster-hook of a chorus sound nearly as sweet without having to sit through the mid-section’s endless organ vamp—a deer in John Kay’s wicked, Harley Davidson headlights?

After the noise of “Less Than What You Think” fades, 50 seconds of colored silence downshifts into 10 seconds of actual, dead silence. A weight is lifted from your ears. And here, at the end, Wilco delivers the joyous, anthemic “Late Greats.” With Ghost, Wilco is reborn. Wiser, yet more elusive, and further ingrained in the pop consciousness.