Wilco

Wilco

Another heartbreaking work of staggering genius from Jeff Tweedy & Co.? Well, no. Being dark and challenging the audience that worshipped you as a "rock" band doesn't automatically make you brilliant (see Thom Yorke). But Wilco's A Ghost Is Born is dark, so much so that it makes Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sound chipper by comparison. Ghost is not a lot of fun. Still, it's an accomplishment, because it's an angry album. This is what anger sounds like after it's been fought to the point of, oh, medication perhaps. And for all the textured moodiness caked over Ghost, it's not radical. As an opener, "At Least That's What You Said" isn't that far off Being There's "Misunderstood," where quiet disappointment turns into sonic rage. "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" occasionally breaks into a bona fide guitar riff. Yet Ghost's rewards aren't found in individual pieces so much as from the trip through the whole. Tweedy enters into it broken and bare and after a series of awkward confessions comes through the back end with cynical humor still in tact on closer "Late Greats." ("The best band will never get signed. ... So good you won't ever know they never even played a show. You can't hear them on the radio.") In fact, there's enough tongue-in-cheek optimism there to suggest that Tweedy is just a happy kid stuck with the heart of a sad punk. Either way, the tension cuts a mean crop of songs out of one man's mania.