Twilight Override

Jeff Tweedy has never been especially concise. From Being There, the double album Wilco released back in 1996, to recent super-deluxe boxes for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born that added more "bonus tracks" than most artists write over their entire career, Tweedy is an unarguably prolific songwriter. So it isn't really a big surprise that his new album, Twilight Override, is a 30-song, 3LP epic that still manages to sound somewhat modest despite its two-hour runtime.In a press statement announcing the album's release, Tweedy described an overwhelming ennui with the current climate of American life, and called the record an "effort to overwhelm it right back." This sense of inevitability and resistance kicks off with "One Tiny Flower," a song about the ambient and overlooked growth that continues within a crumbling landscape. It typifies the kind of unfussy approach that he and his group deploy throughout the album, and presents a low barrier for entry.Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart (both of Finom) — plus James Elkington and Liam Kazar — as well as Tweedy's sons, Spencer and Sammy, joined him at his Chicago studio, The Loft, to ease through this ever-expanding cycle of songs. What emerged is a collection held together by a simple spine of thoughtfulness and solid craft, inviting multiple listens and rewarding each new with new discoveries, balancing the aw-shucks sentimentality of shaky love song "Throwaway Lines" with a pretty spot-on Velvet Underground tribute on "Lou Reed Was My Babysitter."So is there a shorter, stronger album that some sculpting might reveal? Sure, possibly. But in an era where the album format is increasingly porous, this is a more like a document of time and place — and an artist trying to stay sane. As one of the marquee songs, "Feel Free," exclaims near the end of its list of recommendations to coping with modern anxieties, "Feel free, make a record with your friends / Sing a song that never ends." This is the sound of Jeff Tweedy kicking at the American darkness.