“The guitar makes dreams weep.”
To live for and to love music is to be in a constant state of excitement. John Peel famously when asked what the best year was for music said “this year” and sure that’s true, but bring that down a level and every Monday I scour the listings and find something new to be excited about. In a?couple?of weeks which has yielded both an utterly fantastic second album from The Arcade Fire (Neon Bible doesn’t have the immediate impact of Funeral but with every listen it gets better) and a return to form from Idlewild (following two albums that strayed worryingly close to mainstream) I’m already very excited about the new Wilco album, Blue Sky Blue, which I’ve just found out about recently and yet which doesn’t get a release until May!
The track I heard is called Impossible Germany and I’ve added an mp3 of it to the end of this post. This new album is the first studio album to be recorded with Nels Cline, a jazz guitarist famed for his improvisational style who joined Wilco after their previous guitarist Leroy Bach left the band after recording of their previous album A Ghost Is Born was completed. For some reason A Ghost Is Born has never really clicked for me, and now the fact that this track sounds like something more off 2002′s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot which I think is fantastic, has given me hope for my approving of Blue Sky Blue. Cline’s influence can clearly be felt on this new track which weaves gratifyingly simple and direct vocals with interwoven guitars, laden in chorus and reverb, and an almost lazy rhythm, reminding me immediately of Sonic Youth. The lyrics are strange, half finished sentences which look wrong on paper, but in the hands of Jeff Tweedy just work, making you see exactly what he means when he sings something like:
This is what love is for
To be out of place
Gorgeous and alone
Face to face
The guitar work too is sympathetic with the lyrics, offering something that yearns after happy memories and then finding them when the Sonic Youth interplay emerges just after the 4 minute mark.
It is no surprise really that such comparisons be drawn – Cline played on two of Thurston Moore’s (leader of Sonic Youth) recent solo albums entitled In-Store and Pillow Wand. Sonic Youth are one of the great forgotten bands of the 80′s and should be ranked up there with The Smiths and R.E.M. for breathing credibility back into music which had been hamstrung by some of the awful 80′s kitsch. Their 1988 album Daydream Nation is now acknowledged as one of the great albums of the decade and the defining song on that album is Teenage Riot, a song that sits at just under 7 minutes and features much use of the twin guitar work that seems to have informed the Wilco track.
Listen to Teenage Riot on YouTube
That however isn’t the end of the story because both of these tracks, following a common thread, can be tied back to a track on an album of the same name that came out of New York in 1977. Marquee Moon by the band Television again sets a strange broken lyrical style, almost like snatches of a phone conversation, against intricate and inspiring guitar interplay. In the case of Television the guitarists are Tom Verlaine (T.V. = Television) and Richard Lloyd. In this track we find over 10 minutes of deliberate, minimalist instrumentation that puts the guitar solos to the centre and is heralded as one of the first and finest early works of the post-punk, art-rock era.
Listen to Marquee Moon on YouTube
I see a clear thread linking Television’s Marquee Moon through to Sonic Youth’s Teenage Riot and on to Wilco’s Impossible Germany and with such fine heritage I find it hard to believe it won’t prove to be one of the finest and most longlasting albums of 2007, certainly in terms of musicianship, and should be on any person’s wish list for May.
The title of this post is a quote from Federico Garcia Lorca, so there.
technorati tags:music, indie, wilco, sonic-youth, television