A few years ago, Jeff Tweedy sang a simple song called “Low Key,” accompanied by his son, on an album he named after his wife and released on his own label. It would be hard to invent a more defining moment for modern-day Wilco. As a frontman, Tweedy’s interests have grown closer to home, his music has become more subtle, and his band has grown more comfortable. They’ve mostly abandoned their past experimental ambitions to focus on sounding smaller, more subdued. It’s telling that their longest and most expansive recent song is a hushed ballad designed to evoke the spirit of a contemplative weekend morning.
Schmilco, the band’s 10th album, is similarly low-stakes. Though it was written and recorded during the same sessions that led to last year’s nutty Star Wars, it has more in common with 2014’s Tweedy side project. It’s a largely acoustic affair laden with sweet melodies, autumnal production, and childhood memories that stop just short of nostalgic. The songs on Schmilco are wistful and quaint, zooming in on bittersweet moments with a novelistic eye for detail. In “Normal American Kids,” Tweedy recounts a suburban adolescence spent awkward, angsty, and stoned. In “Cry All Day,” he spills his guts at an open mic. In “Happiness,” he turns to his mother for approval but leaves instead with fresh existential depression, lamenting that "happiness depends on who you blame” as the band trudges lazily behind him.
With the exception of “Locator”—the only track here that channels Star Wars’ fuzzy, Jim O’Rourke-era flashbacks—Schmilco finds Wilco at their lightest and folksiest. “Cry All Day” hinges on a quiet anxiety – a little bit “Dancing in the Dark,” a little bit “Talent Show.” “Someone to Lose” and “Nope” each harbor a whimsical, bluesy edge; even the chaotic “Common Sense” retains a laid-back groove through guitarist Nels Cline’s glorious, fret-tapping freak-out. Over a decade after Wilco tacked 12 minutes of dialtone noise onto a sparse piano ballad, their idiosyncrasies are now more discreetly embedded into their music—and they still do simple, twangy power-pop better than just about anyone. On another Wilco album, the three-minute gem “If I Ever Was a Child” might fade into the background; here, it’s the sunny peak.
Even if Schmilco isn’t Wilco’s most exciting album, it’s among their most consistent and immediately gratifying. In “We Aren’t the World (Safety Girl),” Tweedy swipes the chorus from one of pop music’s most shameless stabs at universality, then subverts it by directing it at one person. This moment hints at the kind of insularity that Wilco now favors; they opt for intimacy over inclusivity, directness over dynamics. Schmilco is another decidedly minor release from a band whose best work (Being There, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) once felt like landmarks– but it succeeds in its subtle, freewheeling self-awareness, as hinted by the punny album title and the Joan Cornellà-penned cover art. An illustrator whose surreal, wordless illustrations often depict characters resolving chaotic situations with strange contentment, Cornellà's work is a perfect fit for present day Wilco: they’ve always been low-key, but they’ve rarely sounded so joyful about it.
