Wilco
Cousin
DBPM
Wilco is quicksilver in band form. The longrunning Chicago outfit is always changing, and sometimes in quite dramatic ways. Jeff Tweedy and company zigged down another hallway for their thirteenth studio album, Cousin—which features Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon on production duty—and opened a door to a newly found nook of their discography. Le Bon met the band at the Solid Sound Festival in 2019 and parked the project for a bit while Wilco released last year’s epic Americana double album Cruel Country. For Cousin, the group lean its mid-tempo rock melodies through Le Bon’s layered production approach while swinging back toward the sounds of 2019’s inward and emotional nocturnal Ode to Joy.
Wilco’s collaboration with Le Bon marks the first time since 2007’s Sky Blue Sky that they ventured outside the group for a producer, and the results are quite adventurous from the start. Opening track “Infinite Surprise” has a metered quality as it slowly builds to its soul-rattling outro. There are plenty of slower tracks on the collection such as the relaxing fingerpicking on “Pittsburgh,” where Le Bon’s production feels spartan at first, but is deceptive with its sly multiplicities.
Many of these songs don’t stray too far from the group’s Americana-rock vibes they established as far back as the mid-’90s. “Levee,” “Evicted,” and “Soldier Child” are all warm and easygoing, which is a welcome respite during a fairly dark album. The latter is a particular highlight with its strummed guitar, pained vocal delivery, and rivulets of piano soundtracking tender lyrics about reconnecting with dormant emotions and taking off the mask of adulthood once in a while. Closer “Meant to Be,” meanwhile, is the rare live crowd-pleaser jam with a memorable chorus, scampering beat, and Tweedy resolutely singing, “Our love was meant to be.”
Wilco performs best during Cousin’s reflective ballads in which the drumbeat patterns wander and the guitars crawl rather than gallop. Not every track Wilco attempts here hits all pleasure centers of the brain without hiccups. “Sunlight Ends,” for example, is an electronic percussion oddity tossed into the middle of the album. “A Bowl and a Pudding” is a pleasant acoustic track, but has more vapor trails and Tweedy whispers than anything concrete to take hold of past its run time.
As veteran musicians, Tweedy and his bandmates could have easily punched the clock for Cousin, so it’s encouraging to hear them trying new things almost 30 years into their career. The album perfectly distills the listless feeling of being outside a world that’s supposed to be your home when the past and future squeeze the present to sharp points of suspended animation. As multifaceted and propulsive as the band’s career has been over the years, Cousin does center itself on some tangible themes. Tweedy takes his time to wrestle with his demons throughout the album and even finds some solace within himself and in the communities that welcome him.
