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Wilco - The Whole Love

The Whole Love opens with Art of Almost - a ripping, epic, 7-minute long experimental rock track that breaks you in to the latest Wilco album like Jack Nicholson enters a room, axe-first. And it’s a shining example of the direction Jeff Tweedy & co have taken here - exhilaratingly mixing their experimental tendencies whilst managing to maintain a sense of craft and songwriting. Standing O, One Sunday Morning and I Might are all fantastic songs that could’ve been picked from different albums in their catalogue (although the one it most resembles is 1999’s study of meticulously crafted pop-americana Summerteeth). And yet every single listen to the album reveals something new that makes it well worth repeated spins. It’s bound to earn them continued tags as the American Radiohead (despite Radiohead’s muse taking them in quite a different direction in the last decade) which is something they’ve dealt with since 2002’s career-defining Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. This is easily Wilco’s best album since then and in places touches those great heights.
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