Eugene weekly., February 02, 2012, Page 19, Image 19

music
BY RICK LEVIN
America’s Greatest Rock Band, via Chicago
Wilco bassist discusses touring, playing and recording its best album yet
W
ith R.E.M. having disbanded last year, it would appear
that Wilco now stands pretty well unchallenged as
the greatest American rock band. Since rising from
the ashes of seminal post-punk country/folk/rock pioneers
Uncle Tupelo in 1994, this Chicago-based band has released a
series of albums that continues, with each successive drop, to
challenge, confound, frustrate, mystify and amuse its fans.
In short, Wilco — whose parts include founding members
Jeff Tweedy (singer/songwriter) and John Stirratt (bass), as
well as guitarist Nels Cline, drummer Glenn Kotche and multi-
instrumentalists Mikael Jorgensen and Pat Sansone — is to
American pop what film noir was to the founder of French
New Wave: a reason to rethink everything you thought you
were doing.
And like R.E.M., Wilco won’t sit still. The band is constantly
fluxing and evolving, recreating and broadening its own
artistic parameters only to bust them down at every new
turn. Former R.E.M. guitarist Scott McCaughey, who
collaborated with Wilco on the Minus 5 album Down with
Wilco, says the band appears capable of
anything at any time. “Like
there is no limit to their
greatness,” McCaughey
told me last week. “The
band gets better every
year. They seem to have struck the perfect balance between
visionary leader and democratic contributors, so that each
member adds such an important element to the realization of
the songs, in the studio and on stage.”
The visionary leader of whom McCaughey speaks is
Tweedy, whose songwriting has ascended to that rarified level
of “scary good,” permanently occupied by legends with names
like Wilson, Dylan, Leiber, Lennon and Berlin. On Wilco’s brand-
new album, The Whole Love, Tweedy and company have hit
some kind of peak, stitching together a flawlessly integrated
cycle of songs that is even more daring and refined and
melodically smart than the band’s Grammy Award-winning
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It is also the first record released on
Wilco’s own label, dBpm Records.
As McCaughey puts it: “Jeff can push outward with his
songwriting, getting extremely esoteric and innovative, but
he can pull inward at any time and deliver statements of
simple and direct beauty.”
Along with Tweedy, the only Tupelo alum still in Wilco is
Stirratt, who, with his anchoring bass lines and avian vocal
harmonies, seems to play the steady Starbuck to Tweedy’s
mad Ahab. “Jeff leaves a lot of things open-ended,” Stirratt
says admiringly of Tweedy’s songwriting. “Jeff, he’s tough. He
seems really to like being able to bring it.”
Stirratt says he thinks The Whole Love represents a
culmination for the band, as though this might be the album
Wilco was striving to make from the get-go. “It’s the most
successful recording that we’ve done,” he tells me. “We just
kind of approached it the right way this time by giving
ourselves a lot of time. I do think everyone’s personality came
out on this record in a great way. I think this record has really
been the first to sort of hint at what really could happen.”
Because the band recorded the new album without a tour
hanging immediately over its head, Stirratt says there was a
more relaxed attitude in the studio, more time to explore the
hidden beauty and power of each song. This extra stretch of
playing together and collaborating, he adds, has made Wilco
a more cohesive and focused, and just plain better, live band.
“We can play together really well as an ensemble,” Stirratt
says. “Things just really fell together in a great way.”
And bring it Wilco will, with a tour stop in Eugene on what
will be their first West Coast jaunt in several years. Stirratt says
the band rarely gets out this way and is excited to play for fans
that might not have seen Wilco live in close to a decade. “We
kind of just get back on the horse,” he replies when I ask how it
is Wilco maintains its typically furious pace of touring and
recording. “It’s a tough way to make a living,” Stirratt continues,
and then he laughs. “But it’s still rock and roll.”
Wilco plays 8 pm Friday, Feb. 3, at Hult Center; to request or dedicate a
song, visit the band’s website at wilcoworld.net; $40-$45.
Breathe It In
There are a lot of reasons I shouldn’t like Breathe Owl Breathe. They sound a bit like Jack
Johnson meets Feist in a hookah lounge. They have all the hallmarks of easy-goin’ adult
contemporary indie-folk. But there are things going on beneath the surface that set Breathe Owl
Breathe apart from the “tailor-made-for-Starbucks” scene.
The Michigan-based trio is largely acoustic. There are cellos, shimmering tambourines, playful
keyboards and tuneful banjos. Vocalist Micah Middaugh’s warm wool blanket of a voice is juxtaposed
against the chirping tones of songbird Andréa Moreno-Beals, creating impressionistic images via
word fragments and gentle sounds.
You know when you’re watching that indie film — the one with the impossibly pretty girl-next-door
actress and the sure-wish-I-was-that-charming lead? You think to yourself, They’re too young; their
love will fail. You hope that just for once this will be the love story that comes true. And you
surrender yourself. This is Breathe Owl Breathe.
When Middaugh sings “I was afraid of losing you” on “Across the Loch,” you believe every word
and remember, bittersweetly, all the times you’ve lost something. When he sings “I’ll never tell where
the rope swing is” on “Swimming,” you can’t help but remember those days of freedom and first
kisses. This is what Breathe Owl Breathe is for me, and why I like them. Maybe they’ll mean
something else to you. But they will mean something.
Breathe Owl Breathe plays with Purple Sparrows and Dan Jones (solo acoustic) 8:30 pm
Saturday, Feb. 4, at Cozmic Pizza; $8 adv., $10 day of. — William Kennedy
International Sweat Fest
Like an international sweat fest of nostalgic pleasure, Dengue Fever is better suited as a warmer-
upper than a cold. With a gruff, garage-rock spangle slathered in funk, this L.A.-based band welds
’60s Cambodian pop to a surfboard and floats it out to sea. Founded in 2001 after a trip to Cambodia,
Ethan and Zac Holtzman met a Cambodian-native lounge singer named Chhom Nimol, a star in her
home country, who could sing and write songs in Khmer.
Recently returned from a tour of Southeast Asia (thanks to a State Department grant) that took the
band to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, Dengue Fever uses its members’ varied influences, both musically
and culturally, to fuse a thick-skinned, critically-resistant-to-all-forms-of-vaccination new style.
The most recent album by Dengue Fever, 2011’s Cannibal Courtship, blends a bilingual, almost
Beirut-esque indie rock with thick horns and jungle funk. Electric Cambodia, a 2010 compilation
curated by the band, allows them to dredge history and music from the past and re-present that era’s
original tracks to a new wave of listeners.
Secret Chiefs 3 founder Trey Spruance released Dengue Fever’s first album on his label, and
members of both bands have collaborated on various projects. This is the first time the two bands
have toured together, sharing a co-headline bill. Get there and infect yourself.
Secret Chiefs 3 and Dengue Fever play 8 pm Monday, Feb. 6, at WOW Hall; $13 adv., $15 door.
— Patrick Newson
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