'Sky Blue Sky' supplies perfect summer soundtrack

Maybe of late I've been anticipating my upcoming sophomore summer a little too much, but from its title to its ambling pace, Wilco's "Sky Blue Sky" is the quintessential summer album. Opening track "Either Way" sets the mood with its sunny, mellow picking-and-piano instrumentals and lyrics full of indecisive devil-may-care declarations that define the hazy days of summer. From there proceeds a solid, if not particularly ground-breaking album, one that is easily Wilco at their most accessible and comfortable.

More than anything else, the album recalls that one summer of love and the decade that followed. Frontman and songwriter Jeff Tweedy traffics in well-worn classic rock gestures, bordering on cliche; luckily, Tweedy saves himself from pure homage by taking the language of our parents' generation of music in new, fairly unexpected directions. "Sky Blue Sky" is full of complex songs that seamlessly shift between moods and genres in a matter of seconds. The songs are further brought up to date with lyrics full of twenty-first century ennui and alienation, belied by an instrumental backing that hints at free love and drugs instead. This is definitely an album that post-dates the heady days of grunge and college rock.

Some already have -- and more certainly will -- call out the band for not being "experimental" enough, the label usually foisted on the band by fans and critics alike. In my opinion, just because past albums like "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" and "A Ghost Is Born" were full of deconstruction and genre exploration doesn't automatically make them avant-garde. Led Zeppelin leapt between genres, too, but no one calls them particularly experimental; these days, however, bands are so reluctant to venture outside their comfortable commercially-viable zones that a band as purely Americana as Wilco is held to the highest expectations as experimental rock genius.

Standards are low and labels are cautious these days -- a few short years ago, Warner Records dropped Wilco for refusing to make YHF more mainstream. After which, of course, the band became indie martyrs. This is both a blessing and a curse: as Tweedy told Pitchfork in a recent interview, "I don't feel like we've ever been very experimental to begin with. As far as I'm concerned, we've always been a rock band. We've incorporated a lot of different elements from our record collection, things we like. They're just more organically integrated into what we've been doing or what this record sounds like."

Pitchfork has gone on to basically pan the album for not being experimental enough.

I respectfully disagree. While certainly not Wilco's best album to date, it is also certainly not a half-hearted sellout. To me, the album is merely a reflection of Wilco's ever-changing lineup, which constantly engenders the struggle for a musical identity. Though this is Wilco's sixth studio album, it might as well be a debut for all of the personnel changes that the band has gone through over the years.

"Sky Blue Sky" is the first album to incorporate what many consider to be Wilco's strongest permutation yet, instrumentally speaking: new members Mikael Jorgensen (piano/organ), Nels Cline (guitar) and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone join Tweedy, John Stirratt (bass) and Glen Kotche (drums) in the studio after years on tour together.

The results harken back to the band's first albums, which were a touch more traditional and twangy than recent, sparser albums. The lineup has definitely shaped the album's sound, which is the most guitar-centric of Wilco's entire discography, thanks in part to Cline's status as nascent rock god. As such, the album adheres to the verse-chorus-rocking solo formula of days gone by. The album touches upon many aspects of the '70s in its duration. Acoustic guitar work and gentle harmonies are reminiscent of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and that group's many manifestations. A lot of the guitar solos have wonderful, southern rock expansiveness to them, alternating with the jangle of a jam band. "Shake It Off," in particular, reeks of Jerry Garcia to such an extent that it's ridiculous. My personal favorite example was "Walken," which begins innocently enough with a honky-tonk piano but soon rips open with a guitar solo that's straight out of "Jesus Christ Superstar."

Although the interplay between Cline's guitars and Sansone's keyboard give Wilco a much-needed jolt ("Ghost," while good, was basically YHF round two), I do miss some of the instrumental variety that previous albums incorporated. You won't find the strings I loved so much on YHF's "Jesus, Etc." anywhere on this album.

If the lineup remains intact on the next studio album, which would be a first for Wilco, I would expect and hope for it to depart a little from the formula it seemed to follow on "Sky Blue Sky." That said, although its songs blend and fade into rock's wider discography, they are solid additions to it, and that in itself no small feat -- one that should only garner Wilco fans, not criticism.