Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001)

It’s a cold Chicago night. You’re freezing and struggling to keep warm even under your heavy coat. You light another cigarette as you enter your car to keep warm. Turning on the radio, you switch to some weirdly wonderful pop station, punctuated by static and the sonic bleed of competing signals. The music is distorted and jarring, but strangely beautiful.

Named in honor of the three-word codes used by short-wave radio operators, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot can often evoke such an image in a listener’s mind. Perhaps one of the most brilliantly-crafted pop albums of all time, the Chicago alt-country rockers’ fourth album takes listeners on an existentialist trip, creating a loose sonic meditation on distance and love, using random radio signals as a metaphor.

These songs are not ordinary pop songs by any means. Utilizing blips, radio pops and starts, and all forms of odd sounds and fillers pushed through filters, the band creates a sonic palette that ends up sounding like nothing else before it. Songs like “Ashes of American Flags” and “Poor Places” end in a chaotic catharsis of distortion. “I’m The Man That Loves You”, probably one of the catchiest songs I’ve ever heard, is utterly destroyed by short bursts of ear-splitting, finger-bleeding guitar soloing. The closing track, “Reservations” could not have ended the album more gorgeously and elegantly, leaving the listener lost in a world of ambient sounds.

As lyrically sophisticated and provocative as it is noisy and serene, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is often a dark and melancholy affair. The piano-led “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” is a portrayal of drunken lovesickness, delicately laced with a cacophony of noise, whistles and percussive clutter. The acoustic “Radio Cure” is glum, moody, intriguing and emotional. “Ashes of American Flags” is a cold, chilling poem that is not so much cynical as it is a longing for the days of honest patriotism.

That’s not to say there’s not enough radio-friendly pop to go around, with the anthemic country psychedelia of “War on War” or the nostalgic yearning for a time of youth, innocence, and Kiss covers in “Heavy Metal Drummer”. The song “Pot Kettle Black” in particular makes you wonder just what Reprise was thinking when they dropped Wilco from their label because the album, in their opinion, wouldn’t sell.

You continue to listen to radio station with all of its static and cluttered noise. It is a sound that is sad, celestial, and lovely. You suddenly begin to feel much warmer as a cathartic sense of comfort washes over you. The music makes you feel relieved; you are at peace.

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Slim Cessna's Auto Club - Cipher (2008)

Cipher immediately lives up to its name thanks to its cryptic liner notes, written in, of course, cipher. While this is all well and good, it does kind of defeat the information-conveying purpose of liner notes. Once the track listing has been deciphered, it becomes obvious that there is a motif running through the album: four of the 15 songs are titled “An Introduction to the Power of Braces” with the respective subtitles “Arms”, “Legs”, “Teeth”, and “Faith”. The general theme of these songs is that oft-painful braces are used to straighten and strengthen physical bodies, so why not use them for spiritual bodies? It’s a good point, especially in these days of soft, easy faith.

It’s not all fundamentalist fervor here; SCAC tackles Woody Guthrie with “This Land is Your Land Redux”. Like the original, “Redux” is a protest song, but with a violent twist Guthrie’s work never had. Slim Cessna also seems to be a graduate of the Sufjan Stevens School of Strange Song Titles: Cipher includes numbers such as, “All About the Bullfrog in 3 Verses” and “That Fierce Cow is Common Sense in a Country Dress”. Luckily, the lyrics are as interesting as the song titles, and a nice break from Slim Cessna’s street preaching. The strongest song of the record is “Children of the Lord”, a hard driving gospel song that could make a believer out of just about anyone. Hell, even if you’re not a believer, you just might find yourself tapping your foot and singing along to its catchy chorus.



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