Wilco LANDMARK: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by: Justin Pearsall & Tim Clare Thu:25-Jan-07 Label: Nonesuch Year: 2002 WB rating 90 out of 100

I remember when I first heard about Wilco – I remember it well. Our band’s demo CD had landed in the hands of a music publisher. We were young, naïve, derivative, and we expected to be rock stars by night’s end. After spending 10 minutes with our hopes and dreams, he simply shook his head. Pushing a glisteningly bright silver disc towards me, he offered his condolences: “You need to listen to this.”

I’ve never been good with criticism. I wanted to tell him that he was a know-nothing son-of-a-bitch who lacked any shred of musical knowledge or common decency. But I’m not that big on confrontation, either. So, I took Yankee Hotel Foxtrot from the enemy and promised to despise its contents.

Try as I might, I could not hate this album. It was before David Fricke (senior editor of US Rolling Stone) began shouting Wilco’s praise from the rooftops. It was a time when ‘I Am Trying To Break Your Heart’ was sang from a faceless voice.

It is autumn in 2000, on a cold and windy night at CRC studios in Chicago, Illinois. The clatter of Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett’s argument hangs thick in the air like smog on a Los Angeles skyline, and Tweedy is positioned on hands and knees, head down in a porcelain toilet bowl, purging himself. In retrospect, Sam Jones’ documentary – I Am Trying To Break Your Heart – could not capture the essence of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot more concisely: Tweedy alone, isolated and in the grip of panic, struggling to handle the pressure, to manage relationships and to deal with forces beyond his control.

Opening with the inner turbulence of the title track, we find Tweedy flailing around, akin to a big wounded bear, moaning, wandering, crashing into the world around him; and then watching it tumble. Lonely and in a foreign environment of clunks, clicks and clatter, when Tweedy sings: “I am trying to break your heart”, he sounds like a man so far down he cannot see daylight from trying.

When he awakes, Tweedy is alone on unknown pavement: “Phone my family/Tell ’em I’m lost on the sidewalk.” ‘Kamera’ may sound all pop brightness and new morning sheen, but this cheer is laced with a pretension that Tweedy does not deny: “I've driven in the dark (tell ’em I'm lost)/With echoes in my heart.” We are told not to sympathise, not to condole, the answer is simple: “No, it’s not okay.”

Where ‘Kamera’ detailed the process of absence, it is ‘Radio Cure’ that finds Tweedy explaining his vacancy. Looking for a location empty of anxiety, Tweedy must justify his disappearance to those around him.

Fighting prescription painkillers, a gnawing Bennett, and panic attacks, we return to Wilco’s front-man at the bowl. From this vantage point, Tweedy, the illusionist, may already know he is about to stage another disappearing act – reinventing Wilco with creation and destruction.

The bare-boned evocation that is ‘Ashes Of American Flags’ details the insecurity and weight of these decisions: “I’m down on my hands and knees every time the doorbell rings/I shake like a toothache when I hear my own self sing.” Our panic-stricken protagonist is forced to sit as the world around him moves mysteriously and determinedly, in a way that he cannot command. Aching, like a night of drinking alone and scanning photo albums, ‘Ashes Of American Flags’ forces the listener to take the floor and shake with our leading man.

‘Heavy Metal Drummer’ brings us full circle. Drenched in regret and longing, Tweedy harks back to better times when things were simple: a girl, a guy, music, pot. Romanticism is rife and the ex-lovers, who were in fact the catalyst for destruction, now appear glazed with rose-coloured glasses. The plight being that when you are old enough to know the weight of your actions, you are no longer young enough to be careless about them. The noise of nostalgia, ‘Heavy Metal Drummer’ sends Yankee Hotel Foxtrot rocketing into the past.

Tweedy has been criticised for the diversions he takes in his songs. Upon closer inspection, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot revels in its noise and abstraction, to paint a new, more complex and complete portrait of loss and isolation. ‘Poor Places’ and ‘Reservations’ prove that the album is devoid of passenger moments. Until the dying seconds of the album-closer, Tweedy and Co. are allowing us the space to weave our own journey into the narrative; to put our own spin on the empty man in a crowded room scenario. On ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’, Wilco are telling us that, while it is “not okay”, it is “understandable”.

In Cooke’s documentary, Tweedy says that as the creator there is a freedom in invention, as it is the right of the architect to take the art and destroy it. True visionaries, like Miles Davis and Bob Dylan, realised this, and so does Tweedy. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is an obituary. A eulogy to passing members Jay Bennett and Leroy Bach and a cremation to the Uncle Tupelo sound. It is the clamour of an artist scaling a summit and blowing it apart. Alone again, Tweedy takes the pieces and moves along.