An Album By Any Other Name: Wilco, 'Wilco (The Album)'

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WILCO CAN'T RELEASE a new album without sending the music world into a nostalgic frenzy, reminiscing about the band's bygone heyday and its (maybe) unfulfilled potential.

The group also can't avoid the new tracks' comparisons to older (and supposedly better) songs, or speculation on whether Jeff Tweedy (now in his 40s) may have lost his edge.

But here's the bottom line: Wilco will likely never release an album that is not pure Wilco, and that's good enough.

Sure, "Wilco (The Album)" (Nonesuch Records) doesn't rank among the band's best, but comparatively speaking, it's still probably among 2009's best.

Everything about "(The Album)" seems to scream identity.

Taking the album title at face value, you could assume the music presented herein is definitive Wilco, an audio representation of what the band is all about — and you'd be about half right. There's nothing out of place, but there's also a profound sense of the abstract, and a search to explain the indefinable: "I adore the meaninglessness of the 'this' we can't express," Tweedy proclaims on "Deeper Down."

This Wilco is a band that's already found itself, and is exploring not new territory but rather groove in which it has found itself. The band rests easily in its comfort zone, but with Wilco's comfort zone being about 200 percent wider than anyone else's, that's not really a harsh criticism.

Unlike 2007's overproduced "Sky Blue Sky," this album grabs you right off the bat, with a wider variety of hooks and a more obvious crowd-pleasing sensibility. Fans get a shout-out in "Wilco (The Song)," which declares that even though life may get you down, "Wilco loves you, baby." And the band doesn't ask much in return, either, providing uncluttered, unexperimental songs that aren't at all hard to love.

You and I," which features indie-rock queen Leslie Feist, is a lovely stroll through mellow fields of incomprehensible love: "However close we get sometimes, it's like we never met," Tweedy and Feist duet in perfect harmony.

Along the same lines of simplicity is the understated "Solitaire," which emotes melancholy but not quite depression. "Bull Black Nova" might be of somewhat controversial quality, but if you can accept the relative melodic confusion for what it is, it functions just as the lowest point on "(The Album)'s" chaos scale, and its discord actually serves to make everything else sound that much more fluid.

Much more punchy is "Sonny Feeling," a classic feel-good Wilco song if there ever was one, and "You Never Know," the best example here of why this band won a Grammy for rock music.

The cover may be mystifying, but "Wilco (The Album)" is perfectly within grasp — just enough novelty applied to the old familiar Wilco you love, and who loves you right back.

» Wolf Trap, 1551 Trap Rd., Vienna, Va.; with Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band; Wed., July 8, 8 p.m., $32-38; 703-255-1868.

» RELATED: "It's a Group Effort: Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, 'Outer South'" CD review [Express. May 2009]

Written by Express contributor Afton Lorraine Woodward

Photos courtesy Nonesuch Records