'Cruel Country' by Wilco
It was September 18, 2001 when Wilco released their fourth studio album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and it was largely happenstance that made it—and especially the song “Ashes of American Flags”—an Americana soundtrack for an America that was reeling.
Cruel Country is more intentionally of the moment, especially with all of Wilco determined to play together in one room, and to use minimal overdubs, because for very obvious reasons they weren’t able to do that for a couple years.
The resulting two-disc, 21-song set is, like the best of Wilco’s later work, much less easygoing than it seems near the surface, where Jeff Tweedy’s rasp provides oddly warm comfort amid music that can simultaneously drift toward a star-filled sky and sit rocking on a creaky porch.
Tweedy mostly sings and plays acoustic guitar, relying on the rest of Wilco to tweak traditionalism and modernism: Nels Cline demonstrates restraint and dexterity on lap steel, Glenn Kotche shows Ringo-level suppleness and instinct at slower tempos, and Mikael Jorgenson spreads vivid and pastel hues with his keyboards.
John Stirratt holds up his end on bass with the usual subtlety, Pat Sansone retains his value as a multi-instrumentalist, and Tweedy leans thoughtfully toward the ensemble whether he’s expressing his troubled patriotism in the cantering two-step of the title track, pondering existentialism and the cosmos in the piano-led ballad “Many Worlds,” or grooving on his solitude in the catchy, Spoon-reminiscent “Mystery Binds.”
Tweedy insists on simplicity—“Talk to me/I don’t wanna hear poetry/Say it plain/Like how you really speak” is how he begins “The Universe”—yet even Wilco’s minor embellishments and lightest touches stick in the aural memory as tenaciously as the band’s bigger, brighter strokes on 1999’s Summerteeth.
And minor, light things can turn major and heavy when they accumulate, which they inevitably do on a double album. “The universe/For better or worse/It’s the only place/To be,” Tweedy also sings in “The Universe”; Cruel Country embodies that place and our land in ways that would make Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie feel uneasily at home there.
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