finally, something that's not phish. i've been on a bit of a phish kick lately because that's just what happens to me during late summer for some weird, probably evolutionary reason. my phish hormones start raging and i want to eat bacteria cultures and use my own dreadlocks for clothes. but none of that happens in this universe, because this is the clean-person universe.
well, now that it's fall (at least i'm wearing a hoodie indoors and not sweating), wilco will likely take over. especially because i have to get my wilco fix vicariously this year thanks to the fact that they're not touring the US this fall, leaving with my no choice but to constantly play "the lonely 1" on loop every night while tearing my tweedy posters off the wall, throwing them across the room, and then falling asleep hours later cradling them to my tearstained face and mumbling apologies.
god, i've been reading cracked.com too much.
amidst the blathering, have thee a setlist!
i picked an '02 show to listen to on a cold, dark day because i figured it would be mellow and it seemed to suit the proceedings. little did i know that i'd chosen quite literally the show that plato saw the shadow of on the wall of the cave and he knew he was looking at "mellow".
wilco shows, as is to be expected, generally don't deviate as greatly from one another as phish shows tend to, simply because the songs are mostly pop-rock songs of under four minutes in length. as such, i probably won't talk much about specific tracks in wilco show reviews, but more just about the show in general.
this show started pretty interestingly, with "hesitating beauty" sort of lazily fading in from silence, followed by "one by one". things got about as rollicking as they would ever get with "sunken treasure", and then there was an early pre-ghost is born version of "less than you think", which was pretty much just who i presume to be jay bennett on the keys while tweedy sung over it. pretty great, and lacking the 15 minutes of distortion from the studio version of that track. another highlight was the "war on war"/"kamera" combination...these songs are both mid-tempo slow-rockers in general, and they sound almost indistinguishable if you just have them on in the background, but for some reason i love them both and love hearing them back-to-back even more.
the highlight of the show (maybe) for me was a brief and totally unexpected wilco jam which took place first at the beginning of "how to fight loneliness", then led out of it in the form of a segue into "not for the season", which itself concluded with an epic, multi-minute kotche drum shower.
"poor places" and "reservations" made a good pair of closing songs for the main set, as the static from one led appropriately into the naked-sounding piano chords of the second. after a closing bit of noise-jamming, the encore started with "misunderstood" and continued to be a pretty normal wilco encore, aside from the general mellowness. it's funny how the one thing that always stays the same about wilco is their encore(s). you know you're going to get tons of loud being there songs. it was nice to hear "red-eyed and blue" and "far, far away".
overall this show was very slow and "chill" (as the kids say), and also the soundboard feed is mixed in such a way that often all you can hear is the cymbals, keys, and tweedy's voice, so a lot of times even when the band is clearly playing like they're rocking an arena, it sounds like you're listening to them play on only a piano to a small crowd in a small barn. not bad, but potentially disappointing, depending on what you expect.
this was a show that absolutely epitomizes that just-post-YHF era brooding wilco sound for me. subtract a few style points for all of jay bennett's "i'm soloing even though it's the verse because i don't respect the fact that a song has to have some level of inherent structure because i'm so different", and you have an otherwise great winter '02 show. on a rating scale based on the first five numbers of the fibonacci sequence, this show is a 2.
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