pach1908's Full Review: Kicking Television: Live in Chicago by Wilco
Wilco, along with The Lost Planet Airmen and The Old '97s, are nothing less than gods at the Vic theater as well as nearly every Illinois and Missouri collegiate concert venue. It is true that, at times when gods come back home to the old reliables they turn in sets that are a bit complacent, tired, assuming.
No way on Kicking Television by Wilco, the most daring, original and interesting left-of-the-dial band since REM murmured about radio free europe. And since no right-of-the-dial band even comes close either...well, you do the math. I'm through gushing. On to the review, complete with periodic jaunts of kicking and working it like a rock star in my bedroom since I am playing it as I write.
Things actually stumble just a bit out of the gate with "Misunderstood", with the repetition of "nothing" done about 10x too many. I come at this though from the standpoint of someone who's been with 'em since Uncle Tupelo. I can say two things that are true about the live versions of songs from Wilco CDs "A Ghost Is Born" (their latest), "Summerteeth", "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", and "Being There"
1) If you're a Wilco newbie or merely curious, "Live In Chicago" produces a very accurate portrait of the band as they are now
2) the songs are not the easiest to like and hum along right off the bat. The details and nuances of the music don't immediately reveal themselves and evaporate. They don't immediately reveal themselves, but once they do, they stick.
"Misunderstood," the leadoff track here and on the band's 1996 "Being There" represented revolution and statement of purpose, driven as it was seemingly 180 degrees opposite the band's Uncle Tupelo countrified roots. When Jeff Tweedy sings "I'd like to thank you all/for nothing...nothing..." etc on "Being There" he's churning all the rage it takes for an artist to close a door on one era and open another. On this version I think the repetition is a substitute for the kind of rage from 10 years ago. But that's like saying your head will only explode half when you pump and raise your fists and sing along in anger.
Company In My Back/Late Greats/Hell Is Chrome/Handshake Drugs." In which we shouldn't forget that to tour off an album means to play many many songs from that album. Songs filled with terrific acoustic hooks and deeply private inscrutable meanings. Gone for good are the occasional fiddles and dobros of "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" to make way for a now-fully-in-the-mix Nels Cline and his anthemic guitar work.
One can sing right along to the indelible chorus of "Hell is Chrome" with the soaring guitar part and not understand one lick of the meaning. Handshake Drugs is based loosely I suppose on Tweedy's recent debacle with migraine medication. At a show in Champaign, Tweedy said the song "Hummingbird" was "about a teaching assistant I met once." Much like Beck or Stephen Malkmus, Tweedy likes the sounds words make when put together. So just sing along and listen especially to the gorgeous hooks.
Disc 2 also highlights the much lauded Wilco with Billy Bragg discs which covered previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs. Here we have "Airline To Heaven" and "One By One" but otherwise contains about the same mix and spread of songs across most all of Wilco's CDs ("A.M." the notable absentee). "Radio Cure" and "Ashes Of American Flags" represent Wilco at their most musically complex making for a dark mood at the 3/4 point, leavened then by the autumnal reverie of "Heavy Metal Drummer".
Plenty of Wilco and Uncle Tupelo songs concern themselves with the worship of notes and music, songs and lyrics. And plenty are about...well, whatever Jeff Tweedy wants them to be about. But even a supposedly more inscrutable song like "Jesus etc." can suddenly hit you with a meaning, intended or not as the case may be. You can play that same drinking game as REM's "Murmur" where you take a shot if you can apply a meaning to the lyrics you can audibly understand. Don't get me wrong. Tweedy sings well and the vocal mix is not at all buried. You can make out all the words he sings but he's clearly a lyricist for whom abstraction and meaning both are incidental to the sounds of words being put together.
"Kicking Television" amounts to a live greatest hits disc that can serve as the best intro to the band for a newbie and a well-recorded souvenir for the die-hards
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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