What a great introduction to Star Wars by Parachute Woman! It's a bit of an odd album for me. It's not one where anything jumps out at me when looking at the track list. And yet, whenever I play it, I really enjoy it. And EKG is definitely a strange way to start it, an odd, jumpy instrumental. There's not much to say about this one except wake up! I'm not joining for the solo albums. I haven't explored them, and from the little I've heard, they're not high on my must-listen-to list. And I don't like to comment on songs/albums that are new to me (unless they're new to everyone).
Star Wars general thoughts: I hadn’t paid any attention to the last couple of New Wilco albums during real time (and it’s been well-worth discovering them in this thread discussion) but was fired up when I heard the Star Wars announcement. I was ready...but then quite disappointed when I downloaded and listened through. And can’t recall ever reaching for it again. I’ll see if something rises to the surface while we discuss. I’ll be happy if I find a couple songs to add to my playlist.
Here’s half of the Tweedy touring band performing “God” in the Loft for John Lennon’s birthday. I was lucky to see Autumn Defense back Jeff on this one during his 2010 solo tour. Wilco on Instagram: “On what should have been @johnlennon's 80th birthday – Jeff, Spencer Tweedy and Liam Kazar perform a cover of "God." #gimmesometruth”
My wife takes great pleasure in passing along musical news and info (usually at the end of the day) that she thinks I might not have picked up on. Now, because of constantly checking this forum (as well as a couple other sites), I usually know what she is going to tell me, but most of the time I will "play along" and act surprised at the "news of the day," knowing how much she enjoys "filling me in." (Clarification - I did not always do this, like many other things in the marital life, I learned sort of the hard way that this was something I needed to do). Sometimes, she does actually surprise me and I distinctly remember coming home one night to this conversation: Wife: What do you think about the new free Wilco record? Me: (Knowing all things Wilco): There is no new free Wilco record. Wife: Is too. Me: (Again, knowing of all things Wilco). No there isn't. I would know if there was. Wife: You better check. Me: There's a new free Wilco record! And, sure enough, there was. Having said that, its not a record that I've come back to a lot. I think I saw one of the shows where they played it through - or two. I know I saw either this record twice or once and then Schmilco played through once or twice. But I know I did see this one get played through. I remember liking it a bit more in the live setting. But, like the Tweedy record we just finished, this record, and Schmilco are not records that I listen to a lot. So it will be interesting going through them with all of you all. Perhaps a re-evaluation is in order. We shall see...
Oh man, so behind--listening to the second disc of the album we (you) just finished. ("Flowering"--genius!) Star Wars was my least favorite Wilco new album debut ever. I like it more now, but still have not achieved equilibrium with it. First thought when I heard it, "OMG, these must be the Sukierae cast offs. The band is doomed, the band is doomed." Turns out I was wrong, but that's pretty much what I thought. Cat cover, named after the 1977 blockbuster--I didn't get it and even worse, I think I was right there was nothing to get. Jeff deconstructs I guess. ("Summer Noon"—genius!)
I agree 100 percent with everything @Parachute Woman said in her excellent introduction. I love that they released a new album without the 6 month roll out. These days some bands announce when they go into the studio, then they announce a single, then over the next three months three more singles, and then the announcement that the album will be out in three months. This makes me crazy. Please just announce the album within a month before it is released! I certainly don't need to be informed that you tuned your guitar. I love Star Wars! At the time of release I was convinced that Wilco was now fully back in top form after two steps in the right direction with The Whole Love and the Tweedy album. The fact that it was announced and you could listen right away to some new Wilco was exciting. I do think this album gets overlooked because of that, and because of the wacky album title and cover. I assume many people just don't take it as a serious or proper album. It's Wilco at their most rocking and with plenty of Jeff's punk and noisier influences throughout. I guess it's the closet we may get to their rock n roll record. I'm all for it. "EKG"- Not much of a song, but it's a perfect introduction that tells you to strap in and get ready for the rocky ride. This song screams Sonic Youth and will have you reaching for your leather jacket and hanging up your cowboy hat for the next 30 or so minutes. Although, there are a few moments that have a country side step. I hope many of you listen with open ears and give this fantastic record a fair chance. This is Wilco having fun and letting loose. Another beautifully put together vinyl edition. I have the white vinyl and it looks and sounds amazing. Play it loud! 4/5
I’m a big fan of Star Wars. At the time, I had enjoyed the SBS-WTA-Whole Love run. But the latter two had some spotty moments. Then there was the relatively sombre Sukierae, which was interesting to me, but definitely felt like a decent side project detour. And then Star Wars dropped. A free gift to fans. And it began with this weird little tune called EKG with no vocals. So first impressions from me? I love it! It’s a good indicator of what’s to come. A focused, modern rock record that’s short and sweet. As a fan, I’ll also add that this was an exciting time for me. I recorded a great webcast from the Dec 4 2014 Chicago show in which they dug deep into the catalogue with songs like Dark Neon and Secret of the Sea. Wilco was back live and as good as ever. Then when Star Wars was released they webcast their live set from Pitchfork. Instead of a deep dive into the back catalogue, they played the new album back to front followed by a very tight greatest hits set. I remember watching it live in my living room and loving it. This set was later included as a free download if you bought the vinyl from an indie shop. To me the release really felt like an event.
EKG - what a cool, trippy intro to this great album! I love guitar freakouts like this. I'll be giving the vinyl a spin soon, I always love returning to this one. And that Pitchfork live set is incredible!
Nice intro. I think this track should be reviewed together with More, it works better as a pair. Not really worthy of a full day to itself. And when they played the "full album" live, they didn't actually do EKG, a recording was played as they walked on stage and picked up their instruments.
Star Wars and EKG - A buddy handed me a burned copy of the download and I immediately liked the album - didn't love it, but a few outstanding tracks. I liked the energy of EKG but always wished it had shifted into a full blown rocking song.
Of course, you're dead on right. To put things into perspective, I think there's a sense of Jeff working in a different approach from Sukierae onward (building tracks from his own demos) that gives this impression of an ongoing "phase" in his/Wilco’s career. In truth, I'll admit I hear a difference between "band" records, where they actually play together (from AGIB to The Whole Love) and the "demo" records they've made in the last 7 years or so, where all things start with Jeff alone in the Loft (with a little help from Spencer). I think there's a real difference of approach, and an important one, explaining why all the recent output is seen through a certain unifying lens by some fans. But in all fairness, one only needs a pair of ears to note this method bore very different fruits, and that Star Wars, Schmilco and Ode to Joy are hugely different records, soundwise, stylistically, thematically, emotionally, providing with three vastly different listening experiences. If you'd play the 34 songs to people who never heard any of them completely out of sequence, I'm pretty certain they would organize them in three distinct groups very easily, with not too many mistakes (arguably, there would be much more mistakes if you'd try the same experience with Sky Blue Sky, (the album) and The Whole Love). The last three records have just as much personality and singularity to them as anything the band ever put out in any era. I'm not saying (yet…) that they have as many great songs (let's see how the thread goes), but there's no sameness here, even though Jeff's decided he can't be bothered to wait for all the members to be in the Loft before committing new music to tape, on a daily basis.
This could not be more true for me as well. The one unfortunate thing about Sukierae, an album I like, it is introduced Jeff's sloppy mumble vocals that were often drenched in reverb. I absolutely can't stand it. Like you said, it was an artistic choice, and it's one that has plagued every subsequent Tweedy/Wilco release and marred some really great songwriting. So now we come to Star Wars — an album with some good and bad quirks. Musically, it worked. Promotionally, it didn't resonate with me. The idea of a surprise release is cool. But I am one of the people who really likes the big rollout for a new album by my favorite band. I like the building anticipation. So it wasn't a big factor for me. In this case, the surprise release just made made an album called "Star Wars" seem even more idiosyncratic and low stakes. The title, which is of course not really important at all, was still a bit of a turn off. If you think your piece of art is important, give it an original, creative name that shows some effort. "Star Wars" just doesn't do it. The surprise, the title, the cat, the album length... it all seemed to signal an unserious piece of work. The Whole Love felt epic. Star Wars felt inconsequential — subversive for no real purpose. But that's just the visceral reaction to the aura of the album. The music itself is actually pretty good (despite some aforementioned lackluster vocal performances). I don't listen to this album as much as others, or as much as I should probably. I really do like most of the songs. They come across great live too. After playing the album straight through to start concerts for a few months after the release, these songs have all but entirely disappeared from the setlists these days, with only "Random Name Generator" and "The Joke Explained" being in regular rotation. One other thing: While the album certainly feels live, it is actually not. It was the product of Jeff calling in band members, often individually, to overdub on his base tracks. Along with the sloppy vocals and low fi production, this too became the standard Wilco recording procedure for the next several years.
Sometime in the year before Star Wars came out, I adopted a cat named Elsa that looks like the cover kitty. So when I saw the cover, that was fun. Hearing the album download, I thought there were some good songs, but it didn't really hold my attention throughout. Part of the problem may be that I just don't think the recording sounds good. I know that Wilco CD's tend to be compressed, but the production is usually done with care. This time, I don't know if it's the recording setup or what, but it's squashed and thin, sometimes irritating. If you told me that they recorded mostly with an iPhone, I could believe it. (The original download also has a DR 6, which certainly doesn't help.) The vinyl evidently has more dynamic range, but seeing that just makes me resent them for not taking care of digital listeners, too. Anyway... "EKG" is OK. @Fortuleo said that it's like a Sonic Youth-Pixies hybrid, and that about sums it up. Maybe that's the way it was conceived in the studio, even; someone thought, "Let's work up a Sonic Youth-Pixies jam," as a little exercise, and 70 seconds of it wound up on the album. It works as an introduction to "More...," but might have been a more appropriate intro to "Random Name Generator." The sound is giving me a bit of a headache.
Going back in my memory, there was a lot that turned me off from bothering with the new Wilco album at the time in the summer of 2015. First, the title. Not a fan of the "Star Wars" movies (or sci-fi in general). I'm also not usually a fan of albums that are less than around 40 minutes in length. I generally don't like "surprise" album releases (I prefer to have weeks/months of anticipation and lead up), and the download-only aspect (at least initially) made it seem as though they weren't really very serious about the record. So, as a result, I never got around to buying the album or even listening to it. I guess I felt that, if the band wasn't going to invest much effort in the new music, why should I? From the way they approached the new album, it seemed like something closer to The Wilco Book than the true follow-up to The Whole Love. Going by "EKG", I have to say that my pre-judgment wasn't wrong. It's hard to find a place for something as slight as this brief instrumental on any previous Wilco album. Oh, it's not necessarily bad, it's just that it's an extremely underwhelming way to open up what should have been a major artistic statement as the band's first new album in four years. There's a lot of energy here and some interesting guitar melodies, but, by itself, it's not very compelling. Much will depend on the quality of the album's second track, which I'm assuming cross fades from the ending of "EKG". (I must say that, scanning the track titles on Star Wars, I'm struck by how dumb most of them sound - I'm hoping that the songs are a lot better than the titles).
I love "Your Starter For..." and Blue Moves in general, but, yeah, "EKG" just gets this album off on the wrong note. Without having heard the second track yet, I'm going to wager that it's probably not the masterpiece that "Tonight" is. Everything about Star Wars seemed half-assed at the time and looking at it again now is reminding me that this was a big reason I just stepped quietly off of the Wilco train back in 2015. I'm hoping that the rest of the album will prove my impressions from 5 years ago very wrong.
I think it's important to remember where Wilco was by 2015, before Star Wars was released. They'd released What's Your 20, an "essential tracks" collection (you can't have a greatest hits collection when you don't have hits), and Alpha Mike Foxtrot, a rare/b-sides/live tracks collection, in 2014. The band was touring, but hadn't released a new album since 2011, the longest break between albums in their history. They play a show July 15, 2015, the same mish mash sort of set they'd been doing since exploring the full catalog in 2008 and again in December, 2014 during their Chicago residencies. They release Star Wars on July 16, for free and as a surprise, and then play the album front to back on July 17 at the Pitchfork festival and at almost every show from late summer through fall and winter. That takes some cojones. By June 2016, they start to sprinkle some classic songs into the running order, but they're still doing the Star Wars record in large part, and in running order. For some reason unknown to me, "Magnetized" starts to disappear. By mid-August, 2016, they're still leading off with Star Wars, but early Schmilco tracks "If I Ever Was a Child" and "Locator" start to appear later in the sets, as well. By the end of August, 2016, they stop playing Star Wars, many of its songs rarely, if ever, to be played again. They immediately replace the tunes with Schmilco ones, and that album is released September 9, 2016, mid-tour. Wilco didn't come near me in 2015. I had tickets for the February, 2016 show at the Norva, but missed probably my last chance to see them in a small club for reasons I can't remember; either my wife got sick or our child care fell through, or something. My son was a year old. In hindsight, I should've just gone by myself, but that's not the kind of decision easily made when you're in the thick of it with a baby and you and your spouse are both exhausted. So, I missed my chance to see the Star Wars material live. I've made up for it, to some extent, with Roadcase releases. I tend to think though that these songs sound great on vinyl and don't come across all that well live. This is Wilco's garage rock record, and it works for me as a record, but Wilco as a live unit isn't really a garage rock band. Maybe if I'd seen it performed I'd feel differently. As well done as the Roadcase releases are, nothing beats seeing a great band live and feeling the music at extreme decibels. I, too, have felt like the art, title, length, and release strategy created a whole picture of an album that was phoned in. But listening to the music, it really doesn't deserve that reputation. There's a lot of great stuff happening here, some of it just beneath the surface, but this is maybe the first record where Nels gets loosed on the music in a way that's completely integrated. And my one-year old son loved the album art; the print that came with the vinyl is framed and hangs on his wall to this day. Years later, my one-year-old daughter pulled the record off the shelf by happenstance and loved the cat cover, too. What more endorsement could I need?
Some of Wilco’s later albums are, granted, not as accessible as their albums through SBS. Not as many shimmering pop songs or catchy alt country songs. I think if you give in and let them work their magic you’ll find a lot of nuanced gems though. To me there is a lot to like about Star Wars. For one, when I throw on the headphones it feels a bit like Wilco is plunging me back into the mid 70’s world of Television and Lou Reed. It is a trip I’m happy to take. Jeff definitely has a thing for occasionally starting off an album on the other side of the tracks, EKG being a prime example. Not so much a song as brief introduction to a rock and roll night with Wilco. I find it thoroughly engaging as such. 4.5/5
It's really strange what a difficult time I'm having finding the tracks from Star Wars on YouTube. For today's song, we are going with a needle drop: More... I think this is a terrific track and a great first 'real' song on Star Wars. Catchy, off-kilter guitar riff. Big beautiful chorus. Nels Cline going crazy. Heavy feedback, but still incredibly accessible and relaxed. It's fun. Sometimes I love just having fun with music and not needing to engage with it with all my heart and soul (I like doing that too, but not all day every day). I don't have much else to add. I really like this song. It sounds really great loud in the car too.
The glam vibe is unescapable. The opening acoustic guitar and the fuzzy electric sound are straight out of Hunky/Ziggy Bowie, Ronson all the way. Jeff doesn’t sing it like that, though, but the rest of the album will then go Lou Reed, T-Rex & all, making it almost a concept album schooling us in all things 1972/1974. I still remember my first listen of the LP that summer. When the “More…” chorus kicked in, I had a big grin on my face. This was so catchy, so unpretentious, so triumphant, and it was a great joy to hear Wilco so accessible, almost mainstream-minded, playfully inviting the audience to nod their heads to the anthemic beat. Looking back, I’m not sure why I was so surprised, as there are many songs with such an unpretentious triumphant pop'n'roll quality in the Wilco world. Maybe I was just excited to hear the band again, after the “solo hiatus” and the superb bust mostly morose Sukierae. Right away, you knew it was a record meant for touring, you knew it was designed to be a fun ride. The song is about a band deciding to carry on, giving more, wanting more. I know I wanted more too. I love how Jeff sings the riff in unison with Nels’ guitar, the chorus is catchy as hell (did I say that already ?), it’s almost an arena rock radio single that never was, and it perfectly sets off Star Wars as something like Wilco’s own Monster, the R.E.M record of 1994. You either like it or you don't, but the declaration of intent is crystal clear. Great track, excellent quirky production, and a very effective idea to bury Jeff’s voice in the overall “band sound”, making it one of the instruments.
This was a much better start to the album, and let me know they were going to pull some glitter-rock riffs this time around. Well, "glitter rock" in quotations. More like glitter rock in a two-car garage. It presented a very minor problem I had with the album. I know glitter rock - like the back of my hand. "All the Young Dudes" and Ziggy Stardust are deep components of my musical DNA, music that goes straight back to the source and my early fumbling attempts to grasp the music my older siblings were championing. The most common component of glitter rock was a big, majestic sound, like you were having the best party of all time in a king's court. It glittered. The production on those songs tended to be bright, loud, rock, in your face in a very good way. Wilco's approximation of glitter rock just sounded kind of weird and off kilter to me - again, like a bunch of kids jamming in a two-car garage in the suburbs, at times. It wasn't in your face - it was in the basement. But then I realized -- these guys could do a full-on glitter album with big production and vocals, but it's their M.O. to present the music this way. And the album started working for me a whole lot better once I accepted that. Still, it left me thinking, if I really want to hear glitter rock in all its primal glory, I know where to go. This felt more like my teenage neighbors in 1974 tackling "Roundabout" in the family rec room.
Thirty minutes left and I’m still on alert for something of interest. This second track is okay but I’m not willing to accept ‘okay’ from a group that made Hummingbird, You Are My Face, Deeper Down, Black Moon and I Might (etc etc). I like cats but dislike this cover. Reminds me of the cat in the Bond movie but doesn’t translate well as cover art.
I like More, when I heard it I was somewhat reminded of The Beatles "White". Memories of hearing them play the album live at a festival in Ottawa, I loved it, but maybe not the best choice for such an event.
Check the Wilco channel! They have every album uploaded and organized into playlists. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kNIwmJKP-N82ooPKN40CypTsDI3IcvT1A
