It's the start of Memorial Day Weekend, which means summer is unofficially here, and which maybe means barbecues and/or an extra day off. Nothing goes better with summer barbecues than music, so luckily there's plenty of that this week. I highlight seven new releases below, and Bill talks about Stars, Liam Gallagher, Just Mustard, Dehd, Slang, and more in Bill's Indie Basement.
For more, this week's honorable mentions include Coheed & Cambria, Your Old Droog, HAAi (ft. Romy of The xx, Alexis Taylor, Jon Hopkins & more), The Frightnrs, Bruce Hornsby (ft. Erza Koenig, Danielle Haim & more), Brian Jackson, Enact, Snuffed, Rosie Carney, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Emile Mosseri, Jeshi, Sean Paul, Doldrum, Millyz, Bishop Nehru, Tate McRae, Biitchseat, First Hate, Def Leppard, Besvärjelsen, Sauna (Greys, Weaves, Fake Palms), Trillmatic & Conway the Machine, Bottled Up, Bread Pilot, Sofie Birch, Rip Room, Holocausto Canibal, Alfie Templeman, Blue Heron, UMI, Altair, Total Slacker, Julia Reidy, The World Without Parking Lots, the Mournful Congregation EP, the Rick Hyde EP, the Hovvdy EP, the Public Opinion EP, the CodeName: Rocky EP, the Kamaiyah EP, the Morbideity EP, the Demersal / Piet Onthel / Letterbombs / Vientre split, the Sacred Bones covers comp, the Top Gun: Maverick soundtrack, MONO's soundtrack for My Story, The Buraku Story, the Smoke Or Fire rarities comp, the unearthed Lowlife album, the expanded edition of Eminem's The Eminem Show, and the expanded, guest-filled Bright Eyes reissues (ft. Phoebe Bridgers, Waxahatchee & more).
Read on for my picks. What's your favorite release of the week?
Wilco - Cruel Country dBpm Records
When Wilco released their 1995 debut album A.M., they were still treading the same alt-country waters as the members' former band Uncle Tupelo, but those influences faded into the backdrop over time, as Wilco became more of an indie/art rock band with an Americana tinge. But for their new double album Cruel Country, Wilco sound more like a straight-up country band than they have since A.M., and they're fully embracing the descriptor more than ever. "We’ve never been particularly comfortable with accepting that definition of the music we make," Jeff Tweedy said in the lengthy statement that accompanied the announcement of this album. "With this album though, I’ll tell you what, Wilco is digging in and calling it Country." Like a lot of recent albums, the direction on this one was inspired by the impact of the pandemic. Once they were finally able to get in a room together and play like the old days, they desired to make something more stripped-back, organic, and direct, and country and folk songs are what started pouring out. Keeping with that theme, they recorded almost the entire album live, with just a handful of overdubs, something Jeff Tweedy says the band hadn't done since 2007's Sky Blue Sky.
The sharp turn towards country and folk and the approach to recording makes this the loosest, freest sounding music they've made in a long time, and it doesn't really sound like any other Wilco album, not even A.M. (which, it's probably worth noting, was made with an almost entirely different lineup than the current version of Wilco). But it doesn't come off like some genre exercise; it still sounds like Wilco, and these are still songs that would've fit naturally in just about any era of Wilco's career. It also sometimes sounds a little like Workingman's Dead/American Beauty-era Grateful Dead, and like those albums, it finds a band that can be known for complex, eccentric arrangements getting back to the basics of American music. There's also -- as you may have guessed -- a double meaning to the album title. It's not just that Wilco are embracing country music, it's also that they wrote these songs during a state of American unrest, and they're responding to that with this album too.
"More than any other genre, Country music, to me, a white kid from middle-class middle America, has always been the ideal place to comment on what most troubles my mind—which for more than a little while now has been the country where I was born, these United States," Jeff said. "And because it is the country I love, and because it’s Country music that I love, I feel a responsibility to investigate their mirrored problematic natures." Even if he didn't say it, it'd be clear from listening to the album. "There is no middle when the other side would rather kill than compromise," he sings on "Hints." And later, on album closer "The Plains," he laments, "It's hard to watch nothing change." He also adds, on the title track, "I love my country, stupid and cruel," which comes off like a reminder that criticizing your country doesn't mean you hate your country. It often just means that you want to take this flawed thing that you love and make it better.