The new Wilco album has been out for nearly a week. I don’t like it much – I think it might be even less interesting than Sky Blue Sky. But I don’t like Mike Powell’s review of it much either.
I adored Powell when he was a senior member of Stylus Magazine’s staff. But in this review I think he commits a blunder I never noticed him making before: he gets more interested in his own argument about Wilco’s identity than in Wilco or their music. I think somewhere along the line he dismissed the objective of saying something accurate about them and became more interested in writing something well, something about them, incidentally at their expense.
Other major reviews are less compelling but more accurate.
PopMatters says the band has created an impossibly high standard for itself.
Pitchfork says Wilco (The Album) is a coherent statement of the band’s eclectic identity.
Spin says the band stopped obsessing over change and learned to accept what it is.
Tags: accuracy, adult contemporary, blandness, egotism, Mike Powell, music criticism, Stylus Magazine, Wilco, Wilco (The Album)
