At this point, there are a lot of Wilco albums, and as you may or may not recall, I have listened to all of them.  And since I’d still say Wilco hasn’t ever put a bad album, when a new one comes out, it’s always more of a question of whether it falls into the category of a really good Wilco album or just a pretty good Wilco album.  Because let’s face it, the idea of a great Wilco album hasn’t ever really seemed like a possibility since the release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an album that isn’t quite my absolute favorite album of the ’00s, but there could definitely be a case made for it.  But what I think makes a great Wilco album or even a really good Wilco album all has to do with how this band manages to balance the two seemingly contradictory traits that have often defined them.  This duality I’m talking about is the eternal struggle between Pretty/Pleasant Wilco and Weird Wilco.

The best Wilco albums, like the aforementioned Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as well as 1999’s Summerteeth, and even their last album, 2011’s really good The Whole Love, find the band seamlessly interweaving Pretty/Pleasant Wilco and Weird Wilco.  The band’s latest, which was surprise-released a couple weeks ago seems to decidedly fall into the Weird Wilco side of the spectrum, considering it feels uncharacteristically tossed-off, due to it being released on a whim and the fact that it’s a 33 minute album called Star Wars with a friggin’ cat on the cover.  Also, the album begins with perhaps the most abrasive song in Wilco’s catalogue, the 1 minute 16 second crunchfest that is “EKG”.  It then eases into the somewhat Pretty/Pleasant track “More…”, before we then get another one of the heavier Wilco songs in existence with “Random Name Generator”, though the song’s fuzz is complemented quite nicely by Jeff Tweedy’s innate ability to craft a nice hook without making a big deal of it.

But the more I listen to Star Wars (yeah, I still haven’t quite gotten used to that album title), I’m finding that P/P Wilco is more than present throughout this album that might at first seem like a radical left turn.  Slower ballads like “Taste The Ceiling” and “Where Do I Begin” feel a bit like Wilco songs I’ve heard before, which might sound like a criticism, but the way in which Jeff Tweedy writes songs that have such a familiar, classic-sounding sense of Americana is always welcome to me.  And maybe that’s why Star Wars (yup, I’m just gonna say that that’s a bad album title) feels exactly like the kind of record a band of Wilco’s veteran stature should be making.  It has lots of traces of the band we’ve been listening to for all these years, and yet I can’t say there’s ever quite been a Wilco album like it.  They’ve always been a band who’ve leaned into perfectionism and complicated albums that tend to run a bit long (as evidenced by their sophomore album being a double LP released during the CD era).  But here we get a Wilco that’s a bit looser and a bit more willing to indulge it’s stranger urges, and yet nonetheless has a kind of confidence in its songs that can only come from years of doing it.  Ain’t nothing weird about that.

Favorite Tracks: “More…”, “Random Name Generator”, “Where Do I Begin”

A lot of times, things don’t work out.  Relationships don’t work out, showbiz dreams don’t work out, hell, even a well-intentioned movie site staffed by some of the best pop culture writers around doesn’t work out.  These first two items are what informs a lot of Tobias Jesso Jr.’s wonderfully plaintive debut Goon, which I realize came out over three months ago, but I’ve been getting into so hard lately that I have a hard time not writing about it.  And it isn’t just Jesso’s sadsackery that makes his songs so good, since there are plenty of singer-songwriters out there churning out depressing ballads that have no real reason to be listened to by human ears.  Because despite their melancholy, Jesso’s songs on the other hand have the kind of intuitive melodicism of the Nilsson/McCartney variety, and for that there’s a kind of warmth and comfort that they offer by reveling in the fact that, yeah, life kinda sucks sometimes, but just hang in there and things’ll work out alright.

Jesso’s songs are also so good that you by no means need to know the somewhat talked-about backstory behind this album’s moderate success, though I personally have a hard time not taking it into account.  You see, Jesso moved from his native Vancouver while in his mid-20’s to the dizzying metropolitan funhouse of dreams and disappointment known as Los Angeles.  Then after several years of trying to make it as a pop songwriter/studio guitarist, he moved back to Vancouver after his girlfriend dumped him, and took up piano as he started writing the songs that would eventually appear on Goon.  As you might imagine, being a fellow Northwest-born creative-type myself who couldn’t cut it in Lipstick City, I have an even harder time not connecting with Jesso’s songs with all of this floating around in my head when I listen to them.  Also, because of this I think I can say with some authority that I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song that captures the hopelessness of failing in L.A. quite as succinctly as the heartbreaking “Hollywood”, which more or less serves as the album’s centerpiece.

Again, Jesso’s backstory isn’t remotely necessary to enjoying this album, since Goon‘s barebones approach to the piano ballad certainly evokes a lot of the great LA-based singer-songwriters of the 70s, but ultimately feels pretty timeless.  Still, there is something reassuring about hearing of this underdog’s success, though it’s always a bit hard to gauge the “success” of a guy like Jesso who falls squarely in between the mainstream and indie music camps.  But all I know for sure is that tickets to his upcoming show at Seattle’s Neptune theater in three months are already sold out, which means I won’t be seeing him live anytime soon, though I’m nonetheless happy that he’s already gotten enough notoriety to fill what is a pretty big venue for someone who only has one (admittedly great) album to his name.

Favorite Tracks: “How Could You Babe”, “Can We Still Be Friends”, “Hollywood”