Review Summary: Wilco's latest effort is a country album turned upside-down, donning a warm americana aesthetic as a vehicle to express sadness and disenchantment
Cruel Country is the twelfth studio album from Chicago-based alternative rockers Wilco. While the sextet asserts that they’ve never “fully embraced” a country aesthetic, they are undeniably rooted in the genre, having formed in 1994 from the remaining members of alt-country act Uncle Tupelo. The band is best known for their breakout experimental album,
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which was released in 2001. While the band’s label at the time was so displeased with the record that it refused to release the album, it ended up being Wilco’s best-selling and most critically acclaimed record, landing at #4 on
Pitchfork’s “200 Best Albums of the 2000s.” Since then, the band has largely been recognized for their eclectic indie/alternative rock sound. However, on this latest release Wilco dons cowboy hats and embraces an alt-americana aesthetic from front to back.
Toward the end of the album, there’s a track called “Country Song Upside-down” where Tweedy compares a song he “found” to a trout,
“Dying sky and water / Rainbow / Flickering out.” I view that song as a metaphor for the entire album.
Cruel Country is showing up to the rodeo wearing all the right clothing, but it doesn’t quite blend in: the cowboy attire hangs a little too loosely on the album’s haggard frame, and there’s a look of sadness, even deadness in its eyes that makes it stick out like a sore thumb. Unlike the stereotypical country album, the jangly acoustic guitars and wistful slides aren’t used as a longing ode to a great American past, nor are they used to convey “slice of life” stories of small-town America. Rather, Jeff Tweedy’s country music hangs like a tattered flag, a symbol of the broken promise of freedom he sings about in the album’s closer:
“I like it here, on the plains / From what I see on my TV / There isn’t any point in being free / When there’s nowhere else / You’d rather be.”
In case it’s not clear enough at this point, this isn’t a happy album. Although the music is generally low-key, slow, and even somewhat warm-sounding, it’s easy to miss just how unhappy the lyrics are if you’re just listening in the background. Over the double-album’s 21 tracks, Tweedy’s topics of choice range from depressing political commentary (“Hints”), to thoughts of his own eventual death (“A Lifetime To Find”), and even the potential meaninglessness of it all in a universe filled with dying stars (“Many Worlds”). His lyricism ranges from poetic and inscrutable (“The Empty Condor”) to almost childishly straightforward (“Hearts Hard To Find”), but the key theme of searching for hope in a hopeless world is a common thread running throughout.
Despite the album making me feel like I needed to stand in the sun for an hour, I enjoyed it and thought it was a strong release. It can feel lengthy with its 77-minute runtime and consistent low-key americana aesthetic, but I didn’t feel like it overstayed its welcome. There isn’t really a significant stretch of songs that I thought was weak (“Hearts Hard to Find” through “Please Be Wrong” is the closest I got to that feeling), and the album’s highlights are sprinkled generously throughout the entire tracklist. It’s not the most colorful or ear-grabbing album from a pure musical standpoint, but there’s an understated beauty to many of the songs here that I found really compelling.
Full track-by-track review can be found here: https://nicksmusiclist.com/reviews/cruel-country/
