Keith Pille's Weekly Shuffle

Every week, I will fire up the Shuffle Songs option on my iPod; the first song to come up, no matter what it is, will get an instant, unvarnished review. We're at the mercy of random chance and the limits of my digital music collection. Let's see where this takes us.

Blue-Eyed Soul
Wilco, A.M.

For my money, the stretch from Being There to Summerteeth marks the Golden Age of Wilco. It's not that they stopped making good music after that—I still adore Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the worst thing I can say about A Ghost Is Born is that if it doesn't succeed all the way, it's at least an ambitious failure. But Being There and Summerteeth (and the two Mermaid Avenue albums) are imbued with so much raw emotion and love for music that, even with their rough spots, they outshine the more "artistic" music that seems to have been coming out of Wilco since Jeff Tweedy apparently lost his capacity for joy.

A.M. stands as the counterexample proving that joy and love for music aren't necessarily enough to guarantee a good Tweedy album. A.M. floats in the same rausous-country atmosphere as Being There, but without the oomph. It's not that it's a failure (although it's clearly Wilco's worst album); it has a few moments of transcendence, often riding on the back of fill-in guitarist Brian Hennemen's hot, hot licks ("That's Not the Issue" is a damned fine song, and the "I Must Be High"/"Casino Queen"/"Box Full of Letters" triptych is an excellent way to start a record). But, like the radio band it shares a name with, A.M. has a lot of dead air. It's the only Wilco album to have conspicuous filler—there are stretches where it feels like Tweedy was actually writing for the next Uncle Tupelo album and just assumed that Jay Farrar would be providing something better to take up the space.

"Blue-Eyed Soul" is one of those spots. There's just nothing happening here. A leaden, zombie-slow beat with some half-assed country instrumentation running in the background, over which Tweedy sing-speaks lyrics that sound like college freshman poetry. At his best, Tweedy's songs sound like there's some piece of information inside of him that he absolutely has to get out and share with you; and he spends a lot of time at his best, even on other songs on A.M. (compare, for instance, the urgency with which he sings "Casino Queen" with the Lou Reed monotony he rocks here). With "Blue-Eyed Soul," he sounds like someone at Reprise told him that they couldn't release the album unless he could squeeze out a couple more tracks to flesh things out a little.

Weekly Shuffle Scoreboard (Best to Worst):
1. "Rock N Roll Radio V2," Derailleur
2. "Back from Somewhere (live)," Husker Du
3. "The Ride of the Valkyries," Richard Wagner
4. "Powderfinger," Neil Young
5. "Sliver (live)," Nirvana
6. "Whiskey Bottle," Uncle Tupelo
7. "Don't Be Afraid of the Robot," Electric Six
8. "Gassed & Stoked," Lou Reed
9. "Shooting Star," Golden Smog
10. "You Are the Everything," R.E.M.
11. "Nicotine & Gravy," Beck
12. "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (live)," Wilco
13. "The Calming Sea," Beachwood Sparks
14. "John, I'm Only Dancing," David Bowie
15. "Take It or Leave it," The Strokes
16. "Is It Too Late?", World Party
17. "P'twgs," The Honeydogs
18. "Monkey Dot," Money Mark
19. "I Wanted to Tell You," Matthew Sweet
20. "Dazed and Confused," Led Zeppelin
21. "Soldier's Joy," Mark O'Connor
22. "Blue-Eyed Soul," Wilco
23. "Masoko Tanga," The Police
24. "Scenery," Neil Young and Pearl Jam
25. "We Got The," The Beastie Boys
26. "The Big Foist," The Minutemen
27. "Climbing up the Walls," Radiohead
28. "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," Mission of Burma