jlb1705

I tend to buy CDs rather than mp3 downloads if the price difference isn't more than a couple of dollars. Why? I like to have the booklet, I like to be able to share the music easily with someone else, and I guess I like having the physical copy. Nine times out of ten, though, I add the music to my iTunes and put the CD in a stack, never to be looked at again.

I always buy CDs.  I never pay for downloads unless that's the only way a release is published.  CDs give me a lossless digital copy that also serves as a physical backup.  They are easier to rip than vinyl and I can do with it as I please.  As long as I have the CD, I always have access to that music.  I can rip it, delete it, and repeat that as many times as I wish. I get art with it.  I get to support my local record stores.  If I grow tired of it, I can sell it an recoup some of my money.  I own that copy.

Vinyl is expensive by comparison to other formats.  However, when adjusted for inflation it's cheaper than it's ever been.

So this awesome record club I've been part of for a while now has decided to make A.M. it's Record of the Month, which means it gets a custom pressing and mailed out to their thousands of subscribers. I've always considered A.M. to be Wilco's most underrated record (constantly rated on here below WTA) so it's nice to see it getting this treatment.

 

 

Oh yeah, in case you're wondering the Vinyl Me, Please edition comes with

 

 

• 180g red-tangerine vinyl
• Gatefold sleeve
• New insert design with handwritten lyrics from Jeff Tweedy
• 12″x12″ original art print by Ryder Evan Robison

 

Here's what they have to say about the album:

 

"Wilco is a band that cares about making albums...well-crafted, start-to-finish albums that are born for the vinyl format. Twenty years ago the band released their debut album to little fanfare. In fact, it was largely overlooked at the time, which is what makes this project even more special. A.M. is the hidden gem of the Wilco catalog, one that has slowly emerged as a classic over many spins. Showcasing the emergence of Jeff Tweedy as a band leader and songwriter, this is an album we care about now in 2015 and one that people will still care about in 2035."

 

As I don't yet have A.M. on vinyl, needless to say I'm pretty excited about this release!

 

http://vinylmeplease.com/record-of-the-month/

I'm planning on signing up for this. @ThisIsNowhere, if you want to send me a referral we can each get a free record out of it. 

http://vinylmeplease.com/refer-a-friend/

If you're up for it, just let me know how you'd prefer to send it and I'll DM my info.

This is more about the Central Park show than the album but,

From the Village Voice

http://blogs.village...r_23_review.php

 

I love this review.

 

Here's a little excerpt:

"Throughout the two-hour-plus set, the rain pisses down constantly, and Wilco demonstrate their ability to put over modern blazer-rock better than any of the toothless/hookless/mirthless sensitivos in The National, Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, and others—and they don't resort to Hornsbyisms, try to be U2/Springsteen, or add a fucking saxophone."

 

 

I sort-of like The National, Bon Iver, and Grizzly Bear. But fuck yes. This is correct.

 

The thing I don't like about reviews like that is that there is no reason for the writer to bash other artists in order to prop up the artist he or she is writing about. It's weak writing and reeks of having some sort of axe to grind. Plus, The National put on a hell of a show.

The guy with the Bloodbuzz Ohio avatar feels the need to hijack this thread momentarily with a defense of The National...

Toothless? They have moments on disc and live that are as fierce as anybody going right now.

Hookless? Maybe he just can't recognize a hook when it's sung in baritone.

Mirthless? OK. that one's 100% true, but criticizing The National for their lack of mirth is a bit like criticizing Wilco for their grooming.

Message from Mid-Bar... It's an interesting song, but I don't know yet if it's a good one. It seems like a perfect B-side - a song where the band seems like they couldn't quite finish it to their full satisfaction, but far enough along to warrant being heard.

Speak Into the Rose... The title sounds like Ryan Adams. The music sounds like Neu!. In terms of feel, I think it could have been on the album proper serving the same role as Let's Go Away for Awhile on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. Rock instrumentals usually represent half-baked ideas, but this song is not that at all. It's quite good.

Black Moon (Alt.)... As others have said, this version offers pretty much the same interpretation of the song as the album version. The most noticeable difference is the absence of the strings. Black Moon is my favorite song on the album so far. The alternate version is still good, but the strings on the album version take the song from merely "interesting" to "evocative".

Wilco should play at my house, my house

I'll show you the ropes, kid, show you the ropes

I'll have a bus and a trailer at my house, my house

I'll show you the ropes kid, show you the ropes

I'll buy fifteen cases for my house, my house

Put all the furniture in the garage

Well Wilco should play at my house, my house

You got to set them up kid, set them up

Full disclosure... I've been a regular Pitchfork reader for the better part of a decade and their reviews are often a factor in my music purchases.

I think their review of The Whole Love was fair, and generally positive. The prose wasn't as self-indulgent as many Pitchfork reveiews typically are. I agree with the others who said it read like a review for an album that got a higher score.

I began reading Pitchfork in the first place because unlike other outlets that aligned with my tastes, they utilized the whole scale when rating an album. That has changed over the last few years, and they post a lot of chickenshit ratings that end in ".9" - as if they are afraid to commit to the next whole number. This is especially true for a lot of good music that gets rated at 7.9, since 8.0 or higher generally gets their "Best New Music" designation.

Hmm.. could be. But calling religion "the long lie" sounds pretty rough coming from Jeff (I don't think he's an atheist, is he?).

Keep in mind that those particular words might have belonged to Jane Smiley's boyfriend and not Jeff Tweedy. They lyrics are first-person rather than third-person, after all.

 

I think my main problem is the fact that it sounds like it belongs on Sky Blue Sky instead of this album. Lyrically and musically.

To me, Open Mind sounds exactly like what they said they set out to do on W(TA), but this time they actually execute it. It's direct and sincere, but it is distinctly lacking in cheesiness.

 

So, in other words, any review that has anything critical to say about the album is a poor review?

In the case of this particular album, yes.

Their record label is going to be pissed!

Early favorite: Black Moon

YHF is my all-time favorite album, and to me this song best recaptures that mood.

Hey there, long time lurker- first time poster.

 

I thought I should chime in here on this particular thread. I've been reading everyone's responses to the album and I agree with a lot of it- It's great. I haven't really stopped listening to it. But what I don't understand is the praise that everyone is giving Art of Almost? Am I the only who thinks this is a half-baked song? For me it's easily one of, if not the weakest songs on the album. When I watched the 'Almost' teaser that was released not long ago I was ecstatic, I was the most excited I'd been for an album in a long, long time, let a lone a Wilco record.

 

The first half of the song is great. I enjoy it (bar the intro where the strings come in- sounds a bit tacky to me), but it's all down hill from there.. the guitar playing throughout the outro may well be the most extreme thing Nels has put on a Wilco recording but it fails to get to where it should go, whether or not it's the level of his guitar in the mix I don't know, but it seems to fall short of the mark and is no where near the most interesting thing he's recorded with the band.

 

My biggest beef with the outro however is John's bass playing. His playing is flawless throughout the first half of this song and the rest of the album for that matter, but his playing during the outro is really what ruins it for me (eg, the slide he does at the 6:12 mark). It sounds sloppy as hell. At points it sounds like he's hitting dud notes (whenever he slides). Sure they might be correct as far as musical theory is concerned, but it sounds wrong to me. Maybe for me this is just one part of the record where they shouldn't have put his bass so high in the mix.

 

Anyway, that's all I've got to say. Great record but I don't get all the excitement over this track.

To each their own, but I think you're hearing it differently than most others (or at least differently than I am).

It's chaos at 1000mph - in my view there should be a little sloppiness, a little danger. The outro isn't about having everything in its right place, it's about pushing the song faster and further until it almost unravels, and then drawing it back in at the close. It's an approach that the band has taken on several other songs in the past, but none of them have sounded quite like this. I'm excited about it because I honestly though that Wilco was done making that kind of music.

The outro reminds me of Songs for the Deaf-era Queens of the Stone Age.

Capitol City is the only song from the new album that I skip - I just have this image of Jeff in a straw hat and a red & white striped vest twirling a bamboo cane. ugh.

 

 

But.. I also accept that other folks around here love that song.

It doesn't seem like it should work, but it does. It is by far not my favorite from the new album, but it deserves my attention.

 

It took me years to get into "Radio Cure," but I love it so much I would lobby a strong defense for its #1 slot.

Same here. It probably took me a solid four years of skipping or ignoring the track before it caught on for me. It's a song that rewards patience, and while it lacks the bombast of "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" it makes up for it by being a much stronger song lyrically. To this day, it is the only Wilco song where I remember the exact moment and setting where I "got it".

My list:

Mike Powell writes for pitchfork also.

 

--Mike

Yes he does.

And as it turns out, he's in his own (shitty) band!

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/festival-come-arrow-come/

That's not even music for white people. That's music for coma patients.

"Wilco" is a five-letter word for the quiet slaughter of all that is elemental, passionate, and reverentially stupid about rock 'n' roll. Try finding a vein on a Wilco album. Oh, Wilco: middle-aged Midwesterners with stubble and suit jackets. Precise instrumentalists who make mushy, edgeless music. Two healthy guitarists who alternate featherlight solos with the sound of breeze and rustle. (The pussyfooters call this "atmospherics." Whatever it is, it's very tasteful.) Wilco: The Band That Rocks, Within Reason. Their peak party moments sound like a good time as described by someone who hasn't actually had one. "I'm trying to balance fun with crushing depression," frontman Jeff Tweedy once said onstage. "Always a challenge." In this band, that's a punch line. Is there anything dangerous about Jeff Tweedy? Is there anything dangerous about a pale father of two, comfortable in soft denim, mewling his way through a prescription-pill addiction with songs about how dishwashing just isn't the same without his wife around?

 

History calls their earliest records, A.M. and Being There, "alt-country"—"country" because such a guise can sometimes make its wearers look more grizzled and wiser than they are; "alt-" because they wanted to look grizzled and wiser without being mistaken for two-bits, social conservatives, and/or drunk drivers. (That's a slight to stereotypes, not country.) When Tweedy went to rehab, he managed to make it look polite.

 

I didn't initially bother listening to their last two albums, 2004's A Ghost Is Born and 2007's Sky Blue Sky, because the preceding one, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was turgid and boring. Not awful—just turgid and boring. (It was also the kind of superficial great-leap-forward that inspires mind-numbing critical adulation: It won the Voice's Pazz & Jop Poll that year, received a Pitchfork 10.0, and became the new standard-bearer for American art-rock.) The boredom was something I'd come to expect: Wilco's main selling point, after their bittersweetness, was that they were basically a safe ride. But high art seemed like an unnecessary turn from what was already wholesome and dependable. I wasn't ready to hear what happened next.

 

What happened, it turns out, was that Wilco's albums became less turgid and more boring. Sky Blue Sky was hyperbolically so: pale and gentle, the work of a shaky voice and steady hands. The band's sound sighed and expanded—"country" came to mean something as loose and permeable as it did to the Grateful Dead or the Byrds. For an unfortunate spell, Tweedy appeared more focused on his production budget than on what the band produced. They mellowed—the vibrant, candied sounds of 1999's Summerteeth were crushed and drained of pigment. (Most of this had to do with Tweedy being left to explore his own ass with his head after co-founder Jay Bennett—his muscular, earthy, and pop-friendly foil—was ushered out during the recording of Foxtrot. He later sued Tweedy, went to bed in late May 2009, and never woke up.)

 

But the changes to Wilco were mostly superficial. Apart from the addition of synthesizers and poetic verse, about half of Sky sounds a lot like half of Being There, which was recorded 11 years earlier. Tweedy remains eerily detached; the band, despite losing Bennett (among others) and gaining avant-garde mercenaries Nels Cline (on guitar) and Glenn Kotche (on drums), is restrained and careful. It's still rock music in name only.

 

Now here's Wilco (The Album), a title almost as disquietingly bland as the band. A tame, pleasant, weird little album. A friend (and bigger fan than I) thinks it's like the sigh after the 12th step in the program—or, "Whatever the one is where you apologize for everything." (That's the ninth.) Here, the band remembers what they do best and shakes off most of what they don't. Fewer solos than on Sky, nearly as much noise as on Foxtrot, and some of the belabored textures from Ghost, all in good measure. Tweedy sings about accepting limitations and the cruelty of high school kids. He sings about the ways relationships wane and dissolve. He trades some sweet licks with Cline. The band bucks a couple of times, hardest on "Bull Black Nova"—actually, it's the hardest they've bucked on record since before Foxtrot.

 

The 11th step: "Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out." The key here is "God as we understood God." Wilco finally seem to have gripped, firmly, what they're good at: heavily supervised rock music with a little bit of grit, a few funny noises and production tricks, and enough bromides and nostalgia amid the poetry to make it hit, glancingly. God's will for Wilco? Maybe it's something like, "Give white people something to relax to." There is no way in this beautiful world for me to object to that.

 

I didn't understand what critics and friends meant when they said Wilco had "matured" because they sang about doing the dishes and mowing the lawn. Teenagers do the dishes and mow the lawn. But most teenagers aren't relaxed. They don't face their shortcomings. They could never see a relationship of ellipses and quiet misunderstandings as one worth having.

 

I also didn't understand what critics and friends meant when they would say things like, "Wilco are the American Radiohead." Wilco are not the American Radiohead. Wilco are maybe six weary Jackson Brownes. Or what sandblasted jeans would say if they could talk. Listening to Wilco is like finding a rainbow between gray and tan.I don't love them for it, but I do respect them, more and more: for sucking the sentimentality out of nostalgia, for managing to never write a single truly happy song, for never writing a truly sad one, either. For never being sarcastic. For being almost spooky-earnest.

 

There's an image I have of Jeff Tweedy I can't shake. In it, he's Wilson, Tim Allen's neighbor on Home Improvement. I remember nothing about the show but Wilson—this inscrutable, all-knowing presence just beyond the backyard fence; the neighbor whose face you never see. Wilson seemed to talk to the world through a film. Apparently, he was born in Chicago. Maybe it's a Midwestern thing. Jeff Tweedy sometimes wears a beard, but even when he doesn't, I feel like I never see his face.

After seeing the video of his band performing, I think he's compensating for something in that review.

YHF

ST

AGIB

W(ta)

BT

SBS

AM

Here's my problem. Mike Powell was assigned to review Wilco (The Album) where in his review of Wilco (The Album) did he ever actually review Wilco (The Album)? I read him making fun of white people (that's okay with me), complaining about Sky Blue Sky (I'll allow it), bitching about YHF and taking potshots at Jeff (eh, whatever) and then making that stupid fucking Wilson analogy. Buried in this nonesense is about three or four sentences that actually bother to talk about the actual album and I never got a real sense of what is point was, other than that he doesn't like Wilco.

 

--Mike

This guy wrote the kind of review that everybody who hates Pitchfork thinks they always write.

CDs are the source used to create compressed files (e.g., MP3s). MP3s are compressed versions of CD tracks, and are therefore, by their very nature, inferior copies of CD files, even at super-high bitrates.

 

Simply put, CD tracks contain more information than compressed files. Though the aural differences between CD tracks and high-bitrate MP3s may be minimal to the point of indistinguishable, there is a lot more audio information on a CD than in a set of MP3s ripped from that CD.

 

DVD-Audio and SACD are higher-capacity storage formats that offer even more audio information, and therefore can provide even higher quality.

I've been in a similar (off-topic) discussion in another thread, but I'd like to add that I perceive very little difference between 320kbps VBR mp3s and FLAC or the source disc. I prefer to buy the disc because I like having a physical copy. I really don't play them though. I rip them to FLAC and make multiple backups for archival purposes, and then I convert the FLACs to high-quality mp3s for my iPod/laptop. Those are the files that I generally listen to. It's a lot of work to go through to get some mp3s on my player, but at least I know for sure that my lossy files are as close to source as possible.

ok this sorta confuses me. I know when we are in the world of mp3 and digital downloads, FLAC is far superior. But when you own a physical copy of the CD, wouldn't listening to the CD itself be far greater than ripping it into another format, then listening?

FLAC and other losselss formats get you the exact audio quality that is on the disc. That's why it's called lossless. Plus it carries the advantages of being portable (my Discman is in the attic) and being much easier to keep multiple backups.

I'm here to defend ELT. It's a great song, and came in handy for me in a very cathartic sort of way about a year or so ago. Didn't really pay as much attention to it before then.

I'm trying to take that kind of thing into account as I examine my own preferences and read others'. Something that really hits home for me may not for you, and vice versa.

Some of the songs we're discussing - I may not be into them now, but that does not necessarily preclude liking them down the road. I came to the Wilco cataloge in a strange order: YHF, AM, ST, BT, and then the rest upon release. The songs I liked most on ST for instance are not the ones I like most now. I remember being bored to death by Radio Cure when listening to YHF for years. Then one day, I just 'got it'. I still remember the time and place - it's a special song.

Anyway, I already mentioned that I voted W(ta), but I also agree with everyone who says that time will tell.

I don't have a million dollars, but if I did, I'd bet it that Mike Powell is white.

Then by his logic he should absolutely LOVE Wilco. What gives?

Lance Armstrong chimes in on Twitter:

lancearmstrong And listening to the new Spoon (Austin homeboys). Btw, the new Wilco is very good.

when you guys say lossless..... do you mean listening to it straight off the CD / vinyl?

I'm referring to FLAC - which in my case I ripped from my CD. Much better than an mp3 which loses of quality and nuance in the process of compressing the file. FLAC is still compressed, but not nearly to the same extent and it happens without losing anything that is encoded on the disc.

I'd love to step up to vinyl, but that's a big investment that I can't make quite yet.

The Village Voice weigh in. I think it's safe to say that Mike Powell is not a fan of Wilco (or mid-western white folks for that matter):

...or music?

Apparently dude also thinks that Vampire Weekend's music is about "subtle rebellion". I read two other reviews he wrote just to see where he's coming from, and both of the others also prattled on about what white people supposedly like. Whatever.

I guess next time I'll know to stop reading when I see the words MIKE POWELL.

Name droppings? Sounds... messy.

Listening to it in lossless for the first time. The only words to describe the difference between this and the leaked version are, "The schnozberries taste like schnozberries"

I already liked these two tracks, but I am hearing much more texture in Deeper Down and much more vitality in You Never Know than I was hearing before.