So just who are The Minus Five, and what's their beef with Wilco?
The Minus Five is the pet project of former Young Fresh Fellows leader and semi-permanent R.E.M. sideman Scott McCaughey, the underground pop veteran who has been recording and touring with friends like R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and Posies guitarist Ken Stringfellow since 1995.
McCaughey has also been a longtime friend of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy ever since McCaughey was 40 and Tweedy was 14. In 2001 they finally made good on their talks to record together, with Tweedy bringing along all three of his Wilco bandmates over to record with the Minus Five.
The result is a jangly, jagged, odd, but generally charming batch of songs, cheekily titled "Down With Wilco." It's the first recorded material featuring Wilco since the widely acclaimed "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," but this is far from another Wilco album. Similarities can be drawn, but McCaughey is still the one driving this ship, and his strange sense of songcraft dominates the record.
Subtitled "A Tragedy in Three Halfs," the album's eclectic tone is established immediately on the opening ballad "Days of Wine and Booze," whose first 18 seconds will make you feel like the room is spinning with a cacophony of dissonant strings, choral vocals and a funky bass line. Then McCaughey's piano and clean tenor cut through the mix and lull you into a peaceful song of nostalgia, featuring a wall of muffled synthesizers from Tweedy that gives the track an underwater feel.
The next track, "Retrieval of You," is a complete change of gears: an upbeat, guitar-driven track. One of two songs credited to both McCaughey and Tweedy, the song juxtaposes a bright melody and sunny harmonies with lyrics of bitterness. Written from the perspective of a disc jockey ("They call me DJ Mini Mart/'Cause that's where I work") who helped a rising rock star who's now forgotten him, it's an interesting dichotomy of dark words set to happy music, but McCaughey and company make it work.
That same tactic is used on the album's closer, "Dear Employer (The Reason I Quit)," which sounds like history's most jubilant letter of resignation, and it is equally appealing.
There are a few other good moments on the album. "Daggers Drawn" sounds like a Richard Manuel-penned song from the early days of The Band and features some poignant slide guitar from Buck. "The Family Gardener," sung by Tweedy, could very well have been written with the simple gardener played by Peter Sellers in "Being There" in mind. It leads perfectly into "The Old Plantation," another song of reminiscences featuring beautiful touches of slide guitar from McCaughey.
But there are points where the quirkiness just gets annoying. The dissonant synthesizer, cheerful baritone sax and carnival-like organ riff on "The Town That Lost Its Groove" don't mesh well, and the song becomes grating. On "Life Left Him There," the collage-like arrangement just sounds overbearing.
Those are just two instances where the "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"-like arrangements and production are taken too far, and the album as a whole just seems unfocused. There's no break from song to song, and the listener doesn't get a chance to catch his or her breath and digest these odd songs.
All that having been said, "Down With Wilco" is an appealing record. Its flaws might mean it takes a while to grow on you, but at its core is some quality songwriting -- and when that's in place, it's hard to go terribly wrong.
