Jeff Tweedy writes so properly about his personal music-making, there typically appears little price including: see his bestselling books (the annotated playlist World Inside a Music: Music That Modified My Life and Life That Modified My Music is due November) and his Starship Informal Substack (NB: the July 4 riff on Paul Simon’s “America”). However hey, exterior perspective could be helpful — as Cousin proves. It’s the primary Wilco set because the ‘00s to make use of an outdoor producer, and it exhibits, in the absolute best manner.
The producer is Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, who clicked with the band at Stable Sound, Wilco’s biennial Massachusetts music’n’artwork kegger. She does bizarre properly, as a result of her oddball pop at all times feels rooted within the coronary heart. Tweedy’s a plainspoken dude whose avant-gardening, regardless of rangy sidemen like Glen Kotche and Nels Cline, has often come off extra aspirational than constitutional. So LeBon and Tweedy are a superb match, and perhaps as a result of we’re all swimming in strangeness currently, even Cousin’s extra summary fusions really feel totally pure. On the opener, “Infinite Shock,” tick-tocking percussion clocks a cardiac bass drum, as Tweedy freeze-frames two souls gazing into one another’s eyes (or perhaps one non-binary soul and a mirror) in a second of uneasy, helpless communion, guitar noise and synth detritus thickening and receding like wildfire smoke. Like numerous Wilco jams, it’s an ideal tune about imperfection.
Le Bon’s contact is simple. Given her wickedly Nico-esque 2019 cowl of Wilco’s “Firm in My Again,” one would possibly want her vocals had been extra distinguished. However her musicianship shadows the curveball melodies and clipped watchmaker beats scattered by means of Cousin — a reasonably sharp pivot from the flashback country-rock American of final 12 months’s wonderful Merciless Nation, extra typically conjuring angular Anglo post-punk and old-school Canterbury Scene prog-rock. “A Bowl and A Pudding” is a dubby Nick Drake fever dream; “Pittsburgh” suggests the Unimaginable String Band tripping in a metal mill.
However a part of Wilco’s magic is its mutability (“They are often something,” Le Bon famous admiringly), and the way artfully it at all times cleaves to Tweedy’s narrative voice, probably the most companionable in trendy tune, even when he’s channeling flawed characters, which he continuously is. “I like to take my meds/ Like my physician mentioned,” he sings on “Levee,” a sorta-kinda love tune a couple of relationship that may or won’t symbolize salvation. “Evicted” is an unusually celebratory tune about proudly owning your fuck-ups and their penalties. “10 Lifeless” joins the sorry jukebox of mass-shooting meditations. And “Meant To Be,” the set-closer, is a feint that means a triumphal love tune till you sense the singer’s earnestness is likely to be one-sided. When he sings the phrase “I nonetheless imagine you’re the one one” close to the top, the important thing phrase hangs just like the “BELIEVE” signal above Ted Lasso’s locker room doorway. It’s no insurance coverage of something, but it surely’s a power — like Wilco’s total oeuvre, actually — to maintain us hopeful.
