Wilco Wilco, Summer Teeth [1999]
Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy made his name as a founding member of Uncle Tupelo, the legendary early-'90's band credited with starting a musical genre known in various circles as alt.country or No Depression (the latter the title of Tupelo's 1990 debut album). Uncle Tupelo merged hardcore/punk straight out of the Husker Du songbook with Gram Parsons-influenced Americana/country/bluegrass. After four albums, the tensions inherent in any band with two songwriters vying to control the band's direction split them up. As Tupelo frontman Jay Farrar had a more distinctive style than the more pop-oriented Tweedy, most put money on Farrar's post-Tupelo band, Son Volt, to be the frontrunner to carry the torch. But the spotlight has clearly veered towards Tweedy's work with Wilco. While Wilco's first album, A.M., seemed to pick up where Tupelo's swan song, Anodyne, had left off -- a middle-of-the-road country-rock hybrid with enough pop touches to keep things perky -- it was Wilco's 2-cd follow-up, Being There, which showed the first evidence of Tweedy as a serious songwriter with a voice all his own. Being There covered a lot of ground, including plenty of the old twang to keep the Tupelo fans happy, but made its strongest leap forward with its straightforward riff-laden rock & roll ("Outtasite (Outta Mind)", "Hotel Arizona," "I Got You") and, foreshadowing things to come, introspective, moody epics ("Misunderstood," "Sunken Treasure").

Still, for all the greatness of Being There, Wilco made it's biggest leap forward with it's third album, 1999's Summer Teeth. (Summer Teeth was preceded by Mermaid Avenue, a collaboration between Wilco & Billy Bragg setting previously unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics to music; it's a solid album, with a few strong Tweedy tracks, but not really a proper Wilco album.) Summer Teeth completely abandons the country and punk roots which had lingered from the Uncle Tupelo days. Instead, you've got contagious McCartneyesque pop songs ("I'm Always In Love," the unlisted "Candy Floss") and stark, brooding folk rock ("She's A Jar," "How To Fight Loneliness"). All that and, in my opinion, the most memorable song Tweedy has written to date, the psychedelia-tinged opus "Shot In The Arm" (as well as an unlisted alternate version of the same song). It's a somewhat schizophrenic album -- it veers back & forth between the riff-rockers ("ELT") and the harrowing ballads ("Via Chicago"), so you can either program the disc to suit your mood or just roll through the whole thing and hang on for the ride.


samples		Amazon.com's Summerteeth samples.

links 		Wilco World (official site); Gumbo Page is a fansite with info on Wilco and other alt.country bands.
Opinionated Wilco Discography

Pop Kulcher