Maybe the most challenging thing about Wilco's sixth and seventh LPs-- into the formalist, featherweight Sky Blue Sky and retrospective-in-repose of Wilco (The Album)-- is just how unchallenging they were. These records seemed at times curiously unambitious, coming as they did from one of the most forward-thinking American bands of the last decade and change. Wilco made their early reputation on their creative restlessness, their ongoing identity crisis, but since 2004's A Ghost Is Born-- still, by some distance, their most difficult work-- their music's seemed something of a retreat from their early-decade boundary-shoving. Wilco's great strength lies not just in Jeff Tweedy's world-weary inscrutability, but the ways he and the band matched those stark, sometimes startling sentiments to expectation-defying deconstructions of Americana. The best thing about The Whole Love, Wilco's adventurous, elliptical eighth LP, is the ease with which they've recaptured some of that old unpredictability: From Being There through A Ghost Is Born, the band's best work has always perched itself upon the edge of traditionalism and experimentation, and The Whole Love is the first of their albums in years not to shy away from such risks.
As soon as opener "Art of Almost" whirrs to a start, you'll know something has changed. A glitchy motorik groove crashes into swarming strings before giving way to a slippery Tweedy melody; then it's elegant bass ooze and keyboard creep, over which Nels Cline drapes a searing kosmische capper. Fraught and foreboding, the song is easily the most daring thing they've put to tape since A Ghost Is Born, a interstellar spin on Wilco (The Album)'s highlight "Bull Black Nova". It seems at first as much statement as song: The self-produced Whole Love is the first LP the band laid down entirely in their practice loft, and the brash, voluminous "Almost" feels like six musicians bottling themselves off from the world and pushing each other towards their breaking points. Though nothing else on Whole Love quite matches the exploratory zeal of "Almost", The Whole Love's littered with enough alluringly off-balance arrangements and instrumental left-turns-- Cline's screaming guitar interludes on "Born Alone", the gurgling keyboard underneath the otherwise old-timey "Capitol City", countless rhythmic exchanges between drummer Glenn Kotche and bassist John Stirratt-- to lend the record much of its precipice-teetering feel.
When The Whole Love's not defying expectations outright, it's tweaking them gently. "Capitol City" comes across like Hoagy Carmichael for the "Boardwalk Empire" crowd, a moddish organ gives the bouncy "I Might" the spring in its step, and Tweedy's deft verse-ending vocal turnaround on highlight "Born Alone" is as sharp as it is sly. Much of The Whole Love's midsection draws from this lineup's folk-rock foundation-- splitting the difference between Being There's rockier material and the sunlit Sky Blue Sky stuff-- but these songs seems to bend and sway a little differently than they have in the past. The band, unchanged since the Sky Blue Sky days, seems increasingly comfortable as a musical unit; Cline in particular, whose hotshot contributions to Wilco's last two LPs sometimes felt like glorified session work, is both everywhere and nowhere, subtly coloring in the backdrops yet unafraid to step out into the spotlight. Kotche and Stirratt's aforementioned interplay does wonders even on the quiet numbers, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen mirrors Cline's dialed-down everpresence, and Tweedy himself is still underrated as both player and arranger. Dressed-up with detail as The Whole Love can be, they know just when to it pull back.
In pre-release interviews, Tweedy's suggested many of The Whole Love's lyrics were born of phonetic garble later wrestled into verse. That much would seem to be true of lines like "The Magna Carta's on a Slim Jim blood, brother" from "I Might", but when Tweedy sings, "I wish you were here," on "Capitol City"-- and then, seconds later, corrects himself with, "And yet I wish I were there with you"-- his meaning's certainly clear. This back-and-forth between alluring nonsense and open-hearted sentiment isn't new for Tweedy, but here the sharp split leaves The Whole Love feeling a bit muddled. He's a devoted romantic one moment, detached and random the next, with far fewer of the knife-twisting standout lines that characterized the band's earlier work on either end of the spectrum. Tweedy's crushed-charcoal voice is as rich and immediate as ever, and though he brings it on the big numbers like "Monday" descendent "Standing O", he occasionally loses a syllable or two to nonchalance during the quieter moments.
The Whole Love bows out with "One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley's Boyfriend)", a gently unfurling umpteen-minute heart-stopper loosely centered around a weekend with the Iowan author's paramour. The gorgeous, gripping "Sunday Morning" proves The Whole Love's second major triumph, epic in length but intimate in effect. Unlike "Art of Almost", "Sunday Morning" does nothing to push out the band's boundaries; it is, rather, a very good, very long Wilco song, one that could've appeared on nearly any of their post-A.M. albums. But its length, coupled with its minute-to-minute success rate, leaves it feeling at once impressively ambitious and completely natural, the very midpoint mined by Wilco's three or four agreed-upon masterworks.
It took Jeff Tweedy years to get comfortable with his place in Uncle Tupelo, and a few more to truly settle into Wilco's first act. After a few years of constant sonic flux and personnel shifts, Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (The Album) found the band feeling more resolved than ever, a consistent lineup settling into what seemed increasingly like a signature sound. But Wilco's always seemed their most creatively surefooted atop uneven ground. So the weird, winsome Whole Love is certainly Wilco's least consistent LP in a while, but inconsistency has its own rewards. At its best, The Whole Love finds Wilco casting aside the caution, reveling in their own contradictions.
