If that’s the case, the seemingly limitlessly prolific Wilco leader and songwriter’s fifth solo album must be making a sizable dent to the not exactly small reserves of gloom, misery and fear currently circulating our planet: at 30 songs, the triple album is an almost foolhardily generous offering.
The more you listen and overcome the initial overwhelm that such a huge slab of music can initially trigger, the harder it becomes to find an ounce of flab on Twilight Override. Tweedy’s previous solo records have felt like impromptu opportunities to let off steam and indulge in songwriterly idiosyncrasies away from the more carefully constructed templates and elevated expectations that accompany the making of a Wilco record. There’s little lightweight whimsy and no self-indulgent stretching-out here: especially if ingested as a whole, the album feels weightier, more deeply felt, driven by a thirst to conjure a flicker of hope and a feeling of community or connection in a world riven apart by discord and mistrust.
That it does so while maintaining a slapdash feel of a spontaneous jam session is one of the most potently disarming aspects of Twilight Override.
Recorded in Wilco’s Chicago H.Q. The Loft with a small group of
collaborators (notable Tweedy’s sons Spencer and Sammy Tweedy, and
guitar whizz James Elkington), the vibrant, slimline arrangements
maintain a refreshing looseness and a crackle of energy. For example,
the warily hopeful mantra of “Feel Free” pulsates with a thudding groove
that suggests The Band amalgamated into Crazy Horse finding gold while
feeling their way into a new song, while the ramshackle energy bursts of
“Enough” and “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” feel like particularly ripe
fruits of an excessively caffeinated garage band jam session: ‘’rock and
roll is dead’’, Tweedy barks on the latter, but the joyous performance
provides evidence to the contrary. The swaying, sawdust-kicking gallop
of “Betrayed” (one of the many country-rocking tunes here that bring to
mind Cruel Country, Wilco’s 2022 uneven but often glowing
return to their alt. country roots) opens with Tweedy strumming the
opening chord for what feels like a half an eternity, almost as if
channelling a songwriter who is waiting to magic up a song while the
tape is rolling.
Twilight Override is even more impressive when it
ventures deeper into the slow-burning shadows. The yearning,
economically majestic “Blank Baby” stacks on keening harmonies to create
a vibe of The Beach Boys on a tight studio budget. “Parking Lot” offers
a tantalisingly strange spoken word dream scenario set to a beautifully
languid arrangement. The deconstructed, hypnotic unease and dystopian
visions of opener “One Tiny Flower” ("the cracks in the sidewalk where
all the shops shut down") nods towards – and doesn’t pale next to –
discordant, anxiety-ridden Wilco mini-epics ala “Sunken Treasure”, while
the ethereal drift of the melancholy-sodden, richly resonant “Too Real”
excels in blurrily sketched heartache.
There’s so much good stuff here that it can take several
listens before the less overtly outgoing gems (also including the
wounded hush of “Love Is For Love”) emerge from Twilight Override’s
mass of music. Tweedy has spoken of his habit of jotting down ideas for
songs constantly, almost compulsively, and his more recent output has
occasionally suggested that some of the less consequential sketches have
slipped through quality control. Remarkably for such an immensely bulky
undertaking, Twilight Override offers scant evidence of the
meaningless filler that Tweedy sings about on “Throwaway Lines”, one of
the album’s many highpoints, a stripped-back, direct country-hued gem of
the kind that Tweedy hasn’t really bothered with since Wilco’s 1996’s
widescreen Americana masterwork Being There.
