After lord knows how many listens, I’m still not sure if I’ve listened to this enough times to really accurately put my finger on what I think about this record. It’s also a record that swings from some very notable styles to another, from alt-country to lo-fi to a popier style, and usually on a dime between songs. The opener, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, opens with a very chaotic and sloppy playing style the betrays the utter heartbreak in the lyrics. Lead singer, Jeff Tweedy, assures us that he’s trying to break our heart. It’s clear that the real heartbreak is the other way around. On the sadder end of the spectrum, Radio Cure takes that heartache and adds distance. Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but as he sings, “distance has no way/of making love understandable.” Heartbreak and sorrow is peppered throughout the album on tracks like Jesus, Ect and I’m the Man Who Loves You, but the album has a very playful side to it, and perhaps even a very conscious side.Tracks like Kamera and Heavy Metal Drummer have a much stronger hook to them that makes them a lot more of an earworm. War on War combines a very catchy main hook with a double entendre about the fight for peace in the world and in a relationship, and how turbulent those can be. Ashes of American Flags gets even deeper into the social aspect, with Tweedy singing about the mundanity of life and how hard it is to find anything meaningful to connect to. And despite the record being recorded before the events of 9/11, there’s something haunting as he sings of burning American flags on this song, or with shaking buildings and smoke imagery in Jesus, Ect. Tonally, a lot of it, both in its lyrics and even in some of the electronic backing lightly used as garnish on many of these tracks evokes a weird hybrid of OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac, all wrapped into one huge burrito of indie alt-country. Ashes of American Flags and Poor Places especially make very interesting use of what sounds like radio static and interference giving this sense of underlying uneasiness. Poor Places closes its drone of electronica with a radio transmission repeating the album title over and over. The album closer, Reservations, is the album’s longest track, and to keep up the Radiohead comparisons, it reminds me a lot of a much longer version of Motion Picture Soundtrack, and that’s not a bad thing at all. The very warm but unnerving drones coalescing with the vocals makes for a really interesting closer, and one that goes on even after the vocals drop out. It’s a very unconventional end to what could really only be described as an unconventional album. And one that might really grow on me as time goes on.
Rating 4/5
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