Wilco - Cousin - New Album

[Brian F.]

20 minutes ago, Madcap said:

If I order from bandcamp I get the download which is key since Wilco stopped providing them with vinyl purchases.

 

If you want to stream it, why do you need a download? I thought that the way streaming worked was that you can listen to it on demand.

 

If you bought the CD, you'd have the physical release and you could also rip the individual tracks to listen to on your phone or wherever, no?

 

Incidentally, we live in a strange world where I'm old-fashioned because I favor the late 20th-century technology of the CD over the late 19th-century technology of the LP. 

[Blackberry Rust]

Absolutely delighted (and relieved) an external producer has been brought in. Over the moon that the producer is Cate Le Bon, who - IMO - is one of the most interesting and compelling artists out there at the moment.

 

As for the preview track: breezy and mid-tempo (as per usual since Schmilco), however the production touches are really nice. The stacked guitar/keyboard counterpoint moments in the chorus/outro are pure Cate Le Bon, so that bodes really well for the rest of the album.

[maxspr1]

What sound like pretty finished studio recordings of Pittsburgh and Soldier Child were released on Starship Casual early on. I don’t think they’re the final versions (I seem to remember the accompanying notes from Jeff stated this), but I know at least Soldier Child has Glenn on it. I liked them both and think they’re two of the highlights of Starship Casual to date.

[heychicken]

Quote

Absolutely delighted (and relieved) an external producer has been brought in. Over the moon that the producer is Cate Le Bon, who - IMO - is one of the most interesting and compelling artists out there at the moment.

 

As for the preview track: breezy and mid-tempo (as per usual since Schmilco), however the production touches are really nice. The stacked guitar/keyboard counterpoint moments in the chorus/outro are pure Cate Le Bon, so that bodes really well for the rest of the album.

Wholeheartedly agree. 

I feel like a bit of an outlier in that I don't have super strong hate for newer albums and try to be generous with repeated listens before an appraisal is made. And even on ones that aren't my favorites, those repeated listens always expose more and more - nice when a band has that staying power.

I guess my point is that I think it was important for the band as a unit to go without a producer for so long to develop enough confidence to make a great album whenever they step into the studio with that goal in mind. But I'm glad they seemingly are leveraging that same self-confidence to bring in the set of ears and opinions from a musician that they trust to bring something else out of them. 

[Mko]

[reverandgroove]

The lyrics are up. “A bowl and a pudding” is “Not saying anything” from Starship Casual..

https://wilcoworld.net/music/cousin/

[Brian F.]

Wilco: Now with Saxophone!

 

(Per the credits.)

[5hake1t0ff]

The "Not saying anything" demo was gorgeous. Haven't listened to it in months, but I remember loving it.

[calvino]

1 hour ago, Brian F. said:

Wilco: Now with Saxophone!

 

(Per the credits.)

 

Yeah - I saw that and was happy. 

 

Yesterday, I happen to check out John Grant's - A Boy from Michigan  cd from my library. Not at all familiar with him until  I watched an old video of him performing  "GMF" with Sinéad O'Connor, last week. After seeing that I decided check some of his stuff.

 

While reading the liner notes for A Boy from Michigan, I noticed that Cate Le Bon produced it and Euan Hinshelwood plays saxophone on a few of tunes, too. (Hinshelwood is the one credited on Cousins)

 

[5hake1t0ff]

On 8/3/2023 at 1:15 PM, calvino said:

 

Yeah - I saw that and was happy. 

 

Yesterday, I happen to check out John Grant's - A Boy from Michigan  cd from my library. Not at all familiar with him until  I watched an old video of him performing  "GMF" with Sinéad O'Connor, last week. After seeing that I decided check some of his stuff.

 

While reading the liner notes for A Boy from Michigan, I noticed that Cate Le Bon produced it and Euan Hinshelwood plays saxophone on a few of tunes, too. (Hinshelwood is the one credited on Cousins)

 

I got around to listening to this following your tip. Interesting album, to say the least. Loved the juxtaposition of the deep and warm synth washes with the saxophone. Can’t wait to hear how those sounds mix with Wilco’s sonic range.

[calvino]

7 hours ago, 5hake1t0ff said:

I got around to listening to this following your tip. Interesting album, to say the least. Loved the juxtaposition of the deep and warm synth washes with the saxophone. Can’t wait to hear how those sounds mix with Wilco’s sonic range.

Tweedy using a vocoder may be interesting (or maybe not). I don't think he used one before.

 

[Brian F.]

29 minutes ago, calvino said:

Tweedy using a vocoder may be interesting (or maybe not). I don't think he used one before.

 

 

It kind of sounds like he's using one on "Unlikely Japan," but maybe it's just tape manipulation.

[5hake1t0ff]

Isn't there some vocal effect going on with the background vocals on The Universe?

 

Edit: Specifically the "Everything is listening for what it means" part

[chuckrh]

Very interested in listening to this whole record. I like the first single more than anything on Cruel Country. That's just me though.

[Blackberry Rust]

Via a Hoffmann Music Forum user:

 

From Uncut: 9/10 review:

“If there’s any criticism to be leveled at Le Bon’s production work, it’s that her fingerprints are often audibly all over the albums she produces. However, that’s not the case here: Cousin is deliciously weird and intoxicatingly angular, but it still sounds like a Wilco album, not a Le Bon collaboration. There are crisp drums, bone-dry guitars and woozy synths – of course – but as always with Wilco the material is the thing. No matter how strange they get, these songs could all be played on acoustic guitar, and indeed Tweedy’s acoustic does feature prominently on a number of these tracks. “Pittsburgh”, for instance, is a fingerpicked ballad, yet it opens with huge slabs of distorted synths and plummeting guitar. In one sense Wilco have never sounded like this; in another they always have….

The real highlight, however, is the opener. Almost six minutes long, “Infinite Surprise” is one of the bravest and most infectious songs Wilco have created. It cuts straight in with a clipped beat and guitar abstractions, then builds masterfully as instruments join, fall away and return changed. At its heart it’s an accessible, deeply melodic folk song about the sad mysteries of life and death (“It’s good to be alive/It’s good to know we die”), but it’s dressed in wondrous experimental finery. It ends untethered, exploding into crackles and rattles, an avant-garde fanfare for its makers: (still) the greatest American rock group of the last 30 years.”

[lost highway]

13 hours ago, Blackberry Rust said:

Via a Hoffmann Music Forum user:

 

From Uncut: 9/10 review:

“[Awesome shit].”

 

This bodes well.

[Albert Tatlock]

13 hours ago, lost highway said:

 

This bodes well.

Indeed. The last 5 years of strummy strum strum has left me, well not exactly cold but struggling to actually remember any song apart from Quiet Amplifier. That may be also due to the onset of senility on my part though. I always admired JT for the melodies but they haven't grabbed me in that time. Evicted sounded to me like being on the path back to excitement but not at the final destination yet. This indication is much more like it.

[Brian F.]

7 hours ago, Albert Tatlock said:

Indeed. The last 5 years of strummy strum strum has left me, well not exactly cold but struggling to actually remember any song apart from Quiet Amplifier. That may be also due to the onset of senility on my part though. I always admired JT for the melodies but they haven't grabbed me in that time. Evicted sounded to me like being on the path back to excitement but not at the final destination yet. This indication is much more like it.

 

I hear this with respect to Schmilco and Ode to Joy, but I don"t feel like it describes most of Cruel Country. 

[Albert Tatlock]

5 hours ago, Brian F. said:

 

I hear this with respect to Schmilco and Ode to Joy, but I don"t feel like it describes most of Cruel Country. 

You're probably right and I didn't give CC much time - I still haven't bought it after a few listens on Spotify etc. But it made little impact on me and I was yearning for something more upbeat so I've let is slide so far. I really do like country music too (apart from urban country or whatever it is called) and people like Emmylou are amongst my biggest faves, so that wasn't the issue. The tunes and lyrics just haven't clicked with me. Also no direct snub of Wilco considering I haven't bought any music for over a year I think (and that doesn't mean I'm pirating stuff). Suppose I just haven't come across much new stuff that has grabbed me and time and money for music is limited. 

[Brian F.]

This is something that kind of fascinates me-- how even an artist's biggest fans can often have decreasing interest in the artist's music as they move deeper into their career-- and you hit on something in your last sentence that I think is really significant. Namely, that your time for music is limited. This has come up a lot in the context of Pearl Jam (the only band I've seen more than Wilco), where many of the dues-paying members of their fan club seem to have very little interest in anything the band has done since 1998 (basically, everything after their first five albums), but it's very common with a lot of artists (and there's a Wilco version of it that centers on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot). I have long maintained that this tendency is generally not about the quality of the artist's material (although it can be), but more about the listener. Often, the bands that people love the most are the bands they discovered when they were young and unencumbered by life's more serious responsibilities, which gives them the time to marinate in albums, listening to them over and over and over again. As they get older, and job and family responsibilities start to eat away at their personal time, it's much more difficult to devote the time to a new album. And if a new album comes out and doesn't immediately grab them, it gets set aside quickly. Most of us just don't give music the same time and patience as we get older. I also think that the shift to streaming exacerbates this phenomenon. When people had no choice but to buy albums in order to hear them, they felt more invested in them and were less quick to set them aside. And I think a lot of streaming consumption is done while simultaneously engaged in some other activity and it can make it harder to do the kind of active listening that allows you to really fall in love with an album.

 

For me, with an artist like Wilco (or Pearl Jam), it's not a decision as to whether to buy a new album. Given their track records and my thirty-year histories with both bands, I'm purchasing those albums even if I haven't heard a note. And then I am making the time to listen to those albums, which generally hasn't been difficult because every one of their albums has grabbed me pretty much right away-- with two exceptions, both by Wilco: Schmilco and Ode to Joy. But even as far as those two albums are concerned, I felt like I owed it to myself and to Wilco to give them a lot of runway. (And I don't have a lot of the things that eat away at people's time, like a smartphone or social media or children.) I listened to Ode to Joy every day for about six months trying to find things to appreciate about it, and I did find some things to appreciate about it even if, in the end, it just doesn't measure up to the rest of their catalog for me. 

 

With respect to the money aspect, that's another thing. Again, we have certain financial obligations as we get older that we don't have when we're younger (although, on the other hand, we generally make more money when we're older). And the price of LPs is often at a premium, but I note that CDs are still pretty much a bargain.

[Albert Tatlock]

23 hours ago, Brian F. said:

This is something that kind of fascinates me

Great reply, and the kind of conversation that can be had here rather than on the FaceBook group where any deviation from the party line is a thoughtcrime. BTW I would say that The Whole Love is my favourite Wilco album - so I am not particularly one of the YHF acolytes, and Mermaid Avenue has some of my individually favourite tracks. Still waiting to hear a JT lead vocal version of the Unwelcome Guest some day. But then there isn't an album where I don't dislike something - and would struggle to list 10 albums by anyone where that wasn't true. I'm just very picky and have always wondered at fans who adore all the output from an artist. I don't know if they are brainwashed or sycophantic - just not the way my messed-up brain works. I don't go on about things I don't like from an artist I do admire as there is no point and the great outweighs the poor. Similarly I would hope the artists would respect my right to my preferences and accept and prefer discriminating praise/criticism on occasion when I do offer an opinion rather than sycophancy.

 

P.S. The older artists thing is interesting of itself. Obviously most will be living on past glories and that is completely understandable. That's why I considered that Springsteen Western Stars album such a revelation a couple of years ago (that't one of the few albums I have bought in the last few years. Another would be Augie March - Bootikins and Fontains D.C's first album - FYI.).

[lost highway]

While I never want to be the cult member who flames everyone who critiques the newest stuff, I find there's a hot take/edge lord contingent that's even more obnoxious. Tatlock, I don't find your feelings on the discography to be obnoxious at all. 

 

I think the biggest difference is nuance and if someone is trying to be flippant and explain to the diehards how wrong they are. The reverse side is feeling super protective of a favorite band to the point that any negative criticism feels like an attack on you.

 

I can see where people take the say nothing approach the way you would avoid discussing politics at Thanksgiving. I just find a deep, critical discussion about art to be so interesting. That's one thing this place will always be better for than a Facebook group is.

[Brian F.]

Hear, hear re: Western Stars. I've really enjoyed almost all of Bruce's 21st-century output, but that album is a real standout. Did you see the film he did featuring a live performance of the full album in a barn on his property in New Jersey? It was outstanding.

 

I hope I didn't come across as flaming anyone. I'm just trying to lay out a long-gestating theory as to why a lot of people have a tendency to give new music short shrift: that it often has less to do with the quality of the music and more to do with the diminishing time people have to devote to it as they get older (although sometimes, sure, the new music really isn't up to snuff). There have been a couple of people on the Pearl Jam fan-club message board who have said that they listened to Pearl Jam's most recent album once and never went back to it. (Some of these fans would literally devote more time to standing in line to buy a poster at a show than to listening to the band's latest album.) It really puzzled me that someone would pay 40 bucks a year to belong to a band's fan club and, at the same time, only give that band's new album one listen before giving up on it. The explanation is that they stay in the fan club so that, every two or three years, they can get good seats to see the band play songs that came out in the 1990s and go get a beer when the last twenty-five years of the band's catalog comes up on the set list.

 

I worked with a guy a long time ago who offered to sell me the second Coldplay album the day after it came out. He had absolutely loved their first album but he said he couldn't get into their second album. I was like, "But it just came out yesterday?! How can you know on day two that you can't get into it?!" (It was also funny because the lead single from the second album, "In My Place," was strikingly similar to "Yellow," the breakthrough hit from the first album that he loved so much.)

[lost highway]

34 minutes ago, Brian F. said:

 

I hope I didn't come across as flaming anyone. 

 

Not at all.

[Albert Tatlock]

5 hours ago, Brian F. said:

Did you see the film he did featuring a live performance of the full album in a barn on his property in New Jersey? It was outstanding.

Yes marvellous. An album largely devoid (apart from Sleepy Joe's Cafe I think) of the whiney organ that has always annoyed me on alot of Bruce's tracks LOL. 

 

7 hours ago, lost highway said:

Tatlock, I don't find your feelings on the discography to be obnoxious at all. 

I always phrase things as 'I like/dislike" or "sounds/seems to me" rather than "It is ...". If people do that then there can be no arguments only conversations as far as I am concerned because we are all individuals with different sets of neural connections. Only when some blowhard still weights in with the "definitive opinion" that must apply to all then it is pretty ridiculous.

Also, I found out what an edgelord was after googling tonight.