plorentz's Full Review: Kicking Television: Live in Chicago by Wilco
So you're sitting there, reacquainting yourself with someone you once loved, later hated, and then subconsciously longed for, and you've settled into an energetic ease, a real conversation, a spoken duet. And it's like you're with the world's greatest ex-lover at one of the those stodgy old office parties you like to avoid, and they are (and you are too) a bastion of realness, and comfortable familiarity - ugly mutual history notwithstanding - in the midst of a wildly chattering assembly of artifice, tuxedoed waiters carrying tray of quirky-scary hors d'oeuvres, weaving through it all silently like foreign particles.
But this isn't a cocktail. It's just life, and you've found each other again, and you're back together - not the same as before, but together nonetheless in the new forms which you've each separately adopted. Back in your old neighborhood. And it's feeling cool. Cigarettes taste so good. The old tensions still there, still present and important, still poisonous but inhalable, like the city smog.
Suddenly, you sense a noise in the room, and for a moment it drowns out the conversation. It's a clattering, catastrophic sound. The landing gears failing on the runway. The chandelier crystals raining down on the floor. All those waiters' trays tumbling out of their hands at once, quirky-scary hors d'oeuvres flying. The plaster in the ceiling trickling away slowly. Cracks in the brick fireplace. A seismic tremor. The slow, disastrous rumble of everything falling apart. And you struggle to speak over it, and you struggle to hear over it, and everything that was once feeling easy just moments ago - the reminiscent chuckles and cozy hands on legs and shoulders - is exactly as mean and difficult as it used to be.
But then, you realize that everything isn't falling apart. The ceiling hasn't fallen over your heads. The earth is still, and people aren't screaming or dying, and, in fact, it really does feel nice to be together again.
And the tune goes on, clarified. I'm coming home. I'm coming home. I'm coming home. Via Chicago.
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Wilco's latest studio album, last year's magnificently despondent A Ghost is Born, and, to a lesser extent, their against-odds-triumphant 2001 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, inspired among fans of the band both religious devotion and what-ever skepticism in equal measures. The orchestrated noise of the former, and the patience-testing obscurity of the latter - especially on the endless, minimal drone of the song "Spiders (Kidsmoke)", and the much-talked-about recreation-of-a-migraine the closes "Less Than You Think" - had many folks wondering just wherefore the big fuss over this band, and its petulantly enigmatic leader Jeff Tweedy?
Many could convincingly argue that, in the studio, the group had become a self-consciously artsy snooze-fest, and if Yankee Hotel Foxtrot tended to bedazzle its audience, much of its mystique might be attributed to the behind-the-scenes tumult from which it emerged. Absent that, A Ghost is Born found few champions.
But their live act was another animal altogether. On record, the noise that a song like "Misunderstood" grows out of, the end-times cacophonies into which songs like "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart", "Poor Places", and "Handshake Drugs" devolve sound like a controlled chaos. But in their live shows, when Wilco produce those very sounds - buildings crumbling under scattered piano chords and amplifier feedback - there's a terrifying spontaneity about it. Disaster looms momentarily (or not so momentarily), things fall irreparably apart. There's a sense of danger and claustrophobia (magnified in my own personal experience by extreme heat, the formidable inaccessibility of the exits, and thuggish security workers) to those moments that, far from self-consciousness, fairly reeks of 100% pure rock n' roll.
For those who might doubt it, let me make this perfectly clear: Wilco is a rock band. And not just any rock band, but the kind of rock band that grainy black-and-white documentaries are made about. They are as epic and inscrutable and powerful as The Who or Pearl Jam. But if Daltrey had his rockstar leaps and microphone twirl, and Vedder has soulful psychosis, then Jeff Tweedy has an injured, childlike joy.
And all of that is in evidence on their latest album, their first official live document, the two-disc Kicking Television - Live in Chicago, recorded over four nights in May of 2005 at Chicago's Vic Theatre. And fans of the band who were turned off by the willfully dour A Ghost Is Born would do well to pay attention.
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Drawing songs mostly from their two "arsty" records, with a few older fan favorites - "Via Chicago", "Misunderstood", "Airline to Heaven" (from their collaboration with Billy Bragg Mermaid Avenue Vol. II - Wilco demonstrate for any skeptics still remaining in the audience that even their most depressing songs still rock with a crazy excitement. And in front of a palpably massive hometown crowd that not only sings along adoringly, but at times, openly heckles the band, the songs, the atmosphere, and the band themselves, come scarily unhinged.
There are moments of beautiful, easygoing restraint. The folksy "Wishful Thinking", and the understated soul-lite of "Jesus, etc.", a gentle urban apocalypse in song - tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad sad songs - are all soothing melodies and sparkling lyricism, with seductive hammond organ underpinnings. And then there are times when the band's rollicking good-time rowdiness - see "I'm the Man Who Loves You" (complete with horn section), "Heavy Metal Drummer", and, dare I say, the blistering breakdowns of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" - that it's entirely possible to forget that Wilco is anything other than just a really good, really famous bar band.
Even on the band's most art-noisy songs - the dismal "At Least That's What You Said", the chugging "Handshake Drugs", the dirty summer heat of "Poor Places" - the abandon with which guitarist Nels Cline delivers his fills and solos is concrete and undeniable, and utterly untranslatable to the more controlled atmosphere of a studio. These are sounds born of nervous energy, on-stage adrenaline and sweaty expectation. And in a simply elegant package (with Nonesuch Records' now-typical slip-cover and meticulous art direction, and a small booklet with lots of dramatic photography), Kicking Television delivers the excitement of what Wilco is, in its purest form, with a determined sense of purpose.
Kicking Television is no mere holiday product. In essence, it's the Wilco album for people who hate the bold, italicized Wilco - a brilliant culmination of five years of addiction, division, and a mad scientist's reckless experimentation.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Kicking Television - Live in Chicago" by Wilco
Nonesuch Records
Released 11/15/05
Produced by Wilco
114 min.
SONGS: Misunderstood - Company in my Back - The Late Greats - Hell is Chrome - Handshake Drugs - I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - Shot in the Arm - At Least That's What You Said - Wishful Thinking - Jesus, Etc. - I'm the Man Who Loves You - Kicking Television - Via Chicago - Hummingbird - Muzzle of Bees - One by One - Airline to Heaven - Radio Cure - Ashes of American Flags - Heavy Metal Drummer - Poor Places - Spiders (Kidsmoke) - Comment
Kicking Television-Live in Chicago, recorded over four nights in May at The Vic Theatre. It s really the best it s ever felt, said Jeff Tweedy to the ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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