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Wilco | The Palais | April 18th-19th
Review by Thomas Mendelovits


Anything your favourite band can do, Wilco can do better. Well, almost… but death metal, hip-hop, and punk are lame anyway.

Over two nights at the Palais, lovers of ‘alt.country’ (or judging by the audience demographic, ‘contemporary adult indie’) were enthralled as songwriter-in-chief Jeff Tweedy sang his by turns earnest, sweet, and cheeky, lovelorn ballads aided by his famously accomplished band of five; including free-jazzguitarist Nels Cline and Glenn Kotche, a drummer who has released solo experimental records of his own. Clocking in at over two and a half hours with numerous encores, the Wilco experience was so awesome for this reviewer and evidently many others who snapped up the half-price offer for Wednesday ticket-stub holders and went again for the Thursday show.

The attention to detail shown over Wilco’s last three studio albums (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost is Born, and the yet to be released, though internet-leaked Sky Blue Sky) was equally matched by their live show, with each member adding their own poetic touch and constantly surprising even those fans who know every song note for note. Indeed, during a couple of songs, the whole band looked shocked by some unexpected deft work from Kotche, while the seemingly endless tones coming out of Cline’s guitar plus effects board (he seemed to control the entire mix at times) were a constant delight. The addition of Cline after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was destined to pad out their live sound, but Tweedy showed himself a most fine player too, and the beautifully jagged lines on ‘At Least That’s What You Said’, which I thought heralded Cline’s coming on A Ghost is Born, turned out to be Tweedy’s doing.


To make such complex pop music takes a lot of work, but the members of Wilco must love music so much that it seems more like play. Just watch I am trying to break your heart, Sam Jones’ documentary about the process of recording Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Jeff Tweedy’s jest: “we’ll bring it to you sitting down or standing up. We don’t even need an audience, we’re like this when we go home to practice alone”, repeated over both nights after some of the more excitable audience members tried to instigate a general rise from seats, does not seem in jest at all when you witness Tweedy and ex-member Jay Bennett’s ecstatic reaction to a single keyboard note while they listen to a playback in the documentary.

To my mind, there’s nothing like seeing a band you love charm the socks off the entire audience in witty repartee, and indeed it was great to see Jeff Tweedy prove he is not so self-serious as some of his lyrics may suggest. He answered almost every heckler and brought the house down on a number of occasions. A call for “A.M.!” (their first album) was answered with: “A.M.? You still listen to A.M. here? You think we’re so quaint, going to bed with transistor radios under our pillows, listening to the ball game”. (The request was granted, however, the band played one song from the 1995 album). On the Thursday, Tweedy came out strumming the intro to ‘Hesitating Beauty’ but after numerous requests started an impromptu ‘Reservations’. Seeming to be swayed by a plea from a woman in the front row (“C’mon Jeff, it’s romantic”) the heartbreaking simplicity of the song was only augmented by the band.

A close tie for most magical moment came with the ridiculously perfectly structured ‘A Shot in the Arm’, which hurtles on and on with the bare minimum of chords, seeming to go nowhere but yet constantly changing. The barometer for ‘most magical moment’ in this case proved accurate with a high proportion of audience members losing their shit to this number. The crowd fell dead silent during the final encore on Wednesday, when Tweedy, alone and unplugged, stood on the lip of the stage and sung an old song from his Uncle Tupelo back-catalogue. By now, the rapport generated couldn’t have been any higher, or the applause any louder, and it seemed both band and crowd left positively beaming.