For better or worse, Jay Bennett will probably always be known as The Guy Who Used to Be in Wilco. The success of that venerable Chicago band will likely loom over the rest of his career, and his parting with longtime bandmate Jeff Tweedy has exploded into (semi)legend, thanks in part to Sam Jones's 2002 documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which captured Tweedy at his most aloof and Bennett at his most neurotically exacting.
As Wilco approach even widerspread notoriety, Bennett is rebounding with extreme determination. Since departing the band, he released one album with Edward Burch (The Palace at 4 AM), and not one but two solos albums, The Beloved Enemy and Bigger Than Blue; a third full-length, The Magnificent Defeat, tentatively scheduled for fall 2005, will complete the trilogy. That matches the number of albums Wilco released during Bennett's six-year tenure (if you count his involvement with A.M.). However he may come across in grainy black-and-white, Bennett is-- as these first two solo albums attest-- a musician whose ambitions almost outshine his undeniable talent.
"A lot of times when you're playing," Bennett comments in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, "if you don't have any kind of sonic landscape behind you, everything kind of turns into a folk song." Appropriately, both of these albums are full of folk songs with some sort of sonic landscape draped around them, sculpted at Pieholden Suite Studio in Chicago. On Bigger Than Blue that landscape is minimal and more or less subjected to the demands of the songs, but on The Beloved Enemy Bennett indulges seemingly every whim that crosses his mind. He uses many of the same tricks that helped Being There, Summerteeth, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sound so distinctive; these solo albums, in other words, are no dramatic departure.
Of the two, Bigger Than Blue is more confident, cohesive, accomplished, and, perhaps tellingly, far less fussed over. "My Little Wicked One" and "Outside Looking In" feature only Bennett and his acoustic guitar, while a few tracks, like the Byrdsy "Charming and Plastic" and the George Harrison-haunted "Let's Count Our Losses", are enlivened by a small backing band that effectively draws out the melodies. "It's Hard" churns out a barroom dirge to match his lyrics about self-delusion and regret, and "Curiosity" has a gentle bounce to it, thanks to Brendan Gambel's brushed snare rhythms and Bennett's impassioned delivery, which recalls Elvis Costello in its rough-edged precision.
Bigger Than Blue dips momentarily with the self-conscious "Reasons for You to Love Me (Cars Can't Escape)", which sounds like an overworked Wilco outtake. While the folksy guitar strum of "Songs That Weren't Finished" rights the album in time for its final track, "Reasons for You to Love Me" sounds out of place among so many more or less straightforward arrangements; it's more apt for The Beloved Enemy, which has a lonely, restless vibe-- the opposite of Bigger Than Blue's shambling ease.
On this second album, Bennett is much more concerned with-- or distracted by-- the creation of a sonic landscape. Unfortunately, these songs are all so uniformly downtempo that his heavy production weighs them down and dampens their melodies; as a result, the album fails to establish any pace or momentum, but can only trudge leadenly along. At its most lively, it sounds like it's tumbling apart, with instruments rattling into a song and then falling away. This technique is only sporadically effective: it works on "Genevera", for instance, but not on "It Might Have Looked Like Were Dancing". Overused on The Beloved Enemy, it's too often obtrusive and unmoving.
Despite the difference in approaches and results, Bigger Than Blue and The Beloved Enemy work better as counterparts than as sovereign works: Taken together, they portray the surprise of abandonment, whether it's due to the dissolution of a band, the breakup of a marriage, or the death of a loved one (in addition to losing a few friends and relatives, Bennett went through a divorce prior to recording these albums). On one hand, he avoids lapsing into bitterness or blame, but sounds resigned to the disappointment of so many missed opportunities. On the other hand, these two albums cannot help but remind listeners of Bennett's previous collaboration, and that familiarity keeps him well within the penumbra of Wilco's looming shadow. Perhaps his upcoming third album with put much-needed distance between Bennett the sideman and Bennett the solo artist.
