Jeff Tweedy makes sure he's never the best musician in the room. Ever since he learned the ropes from the more experienced Jay Farrar in Uncle Tupelo, he's surrounded himself with players who are either more technically skilled or possess a distinctive style. It’s an odd strategy for an artist who is himself technically skilled and possesses a distinctive style, but over the last 25 years, it's proved a successful approach. In Wilco 1.0, Jay Bennett helped shape the sunburnt pop of Summerteeth and the twitchy roots-noise grandeur of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; in Wilco 2.0. it was guitarist Nels Cline and drummer Glenn Kotche stretching Tweedy’s songs into k**osmische jams. This is not to downplay Tweedy’s contributions to the band he fronts—just the opposite, in fact, as he uses these idiosyncratic musicians to color in the corners of his own vision.
Spencer Tweedy doesn’t have the pedigree of those musicians—at least, not yet. He may have played on albums by Mavis Staples, White Denim, and Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, but as of this writing he can’t drink legally. Any allegations of nepotism, regardless, are handily dispelled on Sukierae, the double album that Spencer and his dad have recorded under their shared surname. On these 20 songs, the younger Tweedy emerges as the kind of musician who actively challenges his old man. His playing is rooted in jazz, rock, and avant-garde, which means he doesn’t simply keep time and add a lot of fills—but he still defines the grain and texture of these songs. Spencer gives “Diamond Light, Pt. 1” its jittery gallop, “Low Key” its low-key hustle, “World Away” its classic rock rumble. Favoring what might be described as a strum—rolling across toms and kick drum in a rhythm that rocks toward and away from the beat—Spencer ensures his father’s pop melodies never sound settled or merely decorous. Instead, he conveys a jumpy paranoia, as though he and his dad expect to hear the worst news possible.
Listen for his brief pause in the beat on “Slow Love”, which Spencer punctuates with a cymbal crash. It’s a sly trick, which at first seems to disrupt Jeff’s dad-folk tune—as teenagers typically do—but ultimately that small glitch in the song’s momentum commiserates with his dad’s understated rumination on love and commitment, creating a fleeting moment when you can identify the security of a long-term relationship or question it. “What to call it but falling in love,” Jeff sings, striking that familiar tone of laid-back melancholy. “I never needed to know what is was.” The lyrics are straightforward, but the music injects some ambiguity into the song even as it underscores the father-son dynamic. The song works better when you know it’s all in the family.
There are other musicians on Sukierae, including Scott McCaughey on keyboards and vocalists Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig on backing vocals. But Sukierae is typically at its best when it emphasizes Jeff as the proud singer-guitarist and Spencer as the drummer—in other words, when the music is stripped down to its barest essentials, when it’s at its most minimalist, when even the saddest tunes sound like they were a joy to create. And there are many sad tunes on Sukierae, or at least many conflicted tunes pitched somewhere between celebratory and commiserative. Most of them address, usually in a roundabout way, Susan Tweedy’s battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a malignant but treatable form of cancer. The album takes her family nickname as its title, and the backstory lends the music a different urgency, one that belies the breeziness of songs like “Summer Noon” and “Wait for Love”. Jeff is too experienced as a lyricist to address that subject directly, which would makes these songs either too obvious or simply exploitive—the emotion overpowering the music. Instead, he writes around the crisis, transforming the travails of love and commitment into sharp, deceptively sunny hooks. “Low Key” and “I’ll Sing It” continue the subdued power-pop of Wilco’s most recent albums, but the songs are distinguished by the more austere palette of drums and guitar.
Of course, there’s no reason it needs to be a double album. Reportedly, the elder Tweedy penned 90 tunes, but pared it down to a somewhat more manageable 20. But this isn’t Being There, whose two sides obviously commented on and complicated each other. Instead, it’s more like Sky Blue Sky, both in its aggressive breeziness and its repetition occasionally curdling into tedium. The sprawl is less generous than it is indulgent, rendering the album more intimidating and less accessible than it should be. Only Jeff and Spencer can comprehend the full implications of these songs; the rest of us can grasp them only generally. Perhaps, given the story behind the album, that’s exactly what they intended.
