100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 I Am Trying to Break Your Heart

02 Kamera

03 Radio Cure

04 War on War

05 Jesus, Etc.

06 Ashes of American Flags

07 Heavy Metal Drummer

08 I’m the Man Who Loves You

09 Pot Kettle Black

10 Poor Places

11 Reservations

There should be too many great stories, too many moments of perfect symbolic illumination, surrounding Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for the album to actually be that worthy. But the not-so-tall tales exist, in print and on film, and yet the record outweighs any portent or easy summation.

Wilco’s fourth album is a remarkably cohesive, deeply involved song cycle. While it became notorious that one arm of Warner Music (Reprise) parted ways with the band because they didn’t favour the record, and that another Warner Music label (Nonesuch) ultimately signed the band (at considerable additional cost) and released the record to huge acclaim, songs as stunningly good as ‘Ashes of American Flags’ and ‘Jesus, Etc.’ render such anecdotes minor.

It has been a record that was coming, in good and not-so-good ways. Wilco’s third album, 1999’s Summerteeth, had introduced a brooding lyricism and embrace of studio texture to a band that was supposedly one of alt-country’s great hopes. The Chicago band’s chief songwriter and frontman, Jeff Tweedy, wasn’t going to forsake creativity for lineage, and with multi-instrumentalist and studio boffin Jay Farrar as his consigliere, they remade Wilco as a sound, and then as a band. It took various recruits, formal and otherwise, to finish Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and it suits an album that unexpectedly reveals more with each listen.

On the opening track, ‘I Am Trying to Break Your Heart’, elements start and fade, grabs of percussion augment the guitar and electronic textures but never quite fall into line, and what sounds like a zither has a brief ascendancy. The song, and the singer, are trying to find the right path. ‘Let’s forget about the tongue-tied lightning,’ sings Tweedy, ‘Let’s undress just like cross-eyed strangers’. Making amends for self-inflicted loss is a central theme, but little on this album simply tries to be persuasive. The album aims further: to create a world where the only fitting outcome is to heal the existing rift as a way of going forward together.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was recorded prior to the 9/11 attacks, but first streamed online in the immediate months afterwards, and numerous people heard that strange, uncertain new world in songs such as ‘Kamera’. Songs have their own lives, but it’s not hard to see how a desire to make amends, to find something to share – even if it’s an unpleasant truth – would resonate at the start of the century. In the tremulous, gently hopeful ‘Poor Places’, Tweedy sharply sketches a character broken and cut off (‘his fangs have been pulled,’ runs one line), but by the track’s end ‘my’ replaces ‘his’ and a noise collage of feedback and menacing short wave samples has taken over.

In the rich lyrical language there are lifetimes to be found and, as a band, Wilco gave them definition. The stinging guitar that vamps and slices through ‘I’m the Man That Loves You’ plays off and eventually eclipses Tweedy’s bouncy vocal phrasing, while the atmospheric, late-era Beatles dream that is ‘Radio Cure’ has a quiet optimism that outlasts the tired distance of the lyric. And when the release of nostalgic memory was required, ‘Heavy Metal Drummer’ (one of several tracks that strikingly introduced new drummer Glenn Kotche) offered music as a shared communion.

Nothing is cut and dried on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, so time after time it admits you, whatever your emotional standing. You can satisfy divergent needs with this record, and it gives pleasure and sustenance as required. It was the sprightly ‘War on War’ that found the key to unlocking this reinvention of rock & roll intent: ‘You have to learn how to die, if you wanna be alive’.