A Ghost Is Born isn't so much an album about death
(as its title would lead you to believe) as it is
about an old life changing into something new. Like a
big sigh that follows a bigger defeat, Ghost finds
solid footing in the act of moving on. Deep
disappointment haunts these 11 songs, Wilco's
follow-up to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the same way that
cautious, questioning patriotism filled Jeff Tweedy's
lyrics on that album. If Foxtrot's songs were
fractured pop, then Ghost is just plain fracture, a
soft and brutal self-examination that pulls no punches
even as it manages to remain carefully elliptical.
The most concrete musical touch-point for Ghost is
Tweedy's "More Like the Moon" from the 2002 "Kamera"
EP, a softly played and gently picked ode to an
entropic relationship in which "Everything is
breaking/ And it lifts my heart." The understated
keyboards that echo behind Tweedy's acoustic guitar,
almost like mellow notes coaxed from a slide guitar,
create a foundation on which the musical blueprint of
Ghost could have easily been erected. The guitar
work is busy and mature, a precursor to the very
personal statements wrenched from the axes on Ghost,
most notably on "Spiders (Kidsmoke)," in which the
tweaked solos say more than Tweedy's loose lyrics
could about the unhappy clash between childhood and
adulthood. But mostly, it's the last line, "To see you
as an angel/ Some ghostly work of art," delivered in
whispers, that foreshadows the thematic crux of
Ghost.
The unquestionable climax of the new record, which
comes at the end of the song "Theologians," is a
mirror of that line. "No one is ever gonna take my
life from me/ I lay it down/ A ghost is born," Tweedy
sings, as electric guitars make a noisy entrance and
then disappear just as quickly. "I'm a cherry ghost, a
cherry ghost, hey I'm a cherry ghost," Tweedy repeats
in this death's immediate aftermath, a suddenly quiet
and more intimate space. Theologians might not know
nothin' about his soul, as the song says, but it's
also clear that Tweedy is only beginning to understand
it himself. That satisfied "hey" he sings before "I'm
a cherry ghost" is a moment of clarity.
But, you know, whatever. Cherry ghosts? Theologians?
Weren't Wilco supposed to have saved rock? Or were
going to save it? Isn't that what the New York Times
said?
Regardless of expectations, that was never on the
band's agenda. Leave the rock-saving to, y'know, Ryan
Adams or someone, Tweedy seems to say. Wilco instead
continue on the rather epic musical journey of
deconstruction that started with A.M. and have
continued up through Foxtrot. Wilco, more than
almost any other band presently recording albums, have
a thirst for de- and reconstruction, for snakily
winding their way through genres until they emerge clean
and new. In Wilco's case, it's more a redesign than a
reinvention — the reformatting of a band through
membership, instrumentation and experience. Gone is
Jay Bennett, the powerful but ultimately unwieldy
force that drove back Tweedy's more experimental
influences in favor of Moogs and a Wilson Brothers pop
sensibility. He's been replaced with avant-garde
guitarist Nels Cline, laptopper Mikael Jorgensen and,
perhaps most notably, Jim O'Rourke.
O'Rourke, whose talents at the mixing board on
Foxtrot were widely lauded as the key to that
album's soundscapes, has a more integral role in Wilco
this time around, playing on almost every song. Where
on Foxtrot one could point out a bit of noise or
distortion and say "Dude, that's totally Jimmy O,"
Ghost doesn't allow for such simple deductions. A
song fading restlessly into a minute of noise or a
12-minute drone at the end of a piano lullaby is
now just Wilco, the same way that a theremin was just
Wilco on Summerteeth or a harmonica was just Wilco
on A.M. No Bennett here or Tweedy there or O'Rourke
over there — just the sound of a band that knows very
well what kind of music it wants to create, and does
it well.
On Ghost, there was a decision to take the music in a
more understated direction. Rockers like "I'm the Man
Who Loves You" give way to "I'm a Wheel," a jokingly
balls-out sneerfest with lyrics like "Oh hold on/ You
risk exciting me." The vocals sit so high and far away
from the body of the song it's almost like a reminder
of Wilco's progression: This is not A.M., but, hey,
we can still be this kind of band.
The results are more effective when they flex their
more streamlined, integrated, and challenging
post-Foxtrot muscle. "At Least That's What You Said"
appends a four-minute Neil Young guitar extravaganza
to a fragile two-minute rumination on an impending
divorce. "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" uses power chords as
punctuation between lengthy blocks of hammering
Krautrock insistence. "Muzzle of Bees" finds melody
amidst chaotic, otherworldly guitars.
Yet throughout all the new sounds, Tweedy's searching,
pained lyrics create a thread that, like breadcrumbs
on a trail, leads you back and around to the album's
permeating theme of self-rediscovery. Drugs are
bought, relationships end in unanswered questions,
souls remain mysterious, ineffective lovers roam
America looking for a place to bury memories, and, in
the end, Tweedy sings that "there's so much less to
this than you think," before slipping headlong into a
strenuous, painful drone that leaves, among lots of
other things, some room to consider that statement.
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