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Rating: What a drag, Flo, you always go to hear the same things. Do you really think it's worth bothering the saint who puts up with you (bless him) to drive 400 kilometers to see the same band for the third time? You don’t want to come back at 3 a.m. with your doctorate due in a month, right?
Yes, I think it's worth it. Imagine if I had missed the dream setlist they offered the audience at the Gran Teatro Geox last Friday. I would have been kicking myself.
Initially, I honestly thought Jeff Tweedy was a bit off. Maybe it was the seated audience's fault, or maybe it was the first listen to two new, somewhat "mellow" songs with which they opened the concert: I’m not sure. But Wilco never fail to surprise me: I've never seen two identical concerts, and even the setlists change every night during the same tour.
After Bright Leaves and Before Us from the upcoming Ode to Joy album due out in October, the guitars accompanied by the drums of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart arrive, always making a strong impression live and inviting the audience to twist the words of the chorus. Until a few years ago, the song often faded after various distortions into Art of Almost, a true mystical experience but now seems to have been set aside. It’s replaced by an unexpected One Wing that certainly doesn't make you miss it and gives you a slight shiver.
Another song from the new album (One and a Half Stars), rather catchy, and my favorite from Schmilco (If I Ever Was a Child), then they play a four of a kind with Handshake Drugs, At Least That's What You Said, wonderful with that central crescendo and where Nels Cline displays all his mastery, a You and I that starts with Jeff Tweedy alone on the guitar*, and Hummingbird that can even put me in a good mood.
The tension is momentarily interrupted by another unreleased song (White Wooden Cross) before the climax of the whole concert, with Via Chicago, which opens celestial but which the distorted guitars and Glenn Kotche's drums (he always has a blast when he plays, and in my opinion, he’s an alien) love to disintegrate in multiple points, disorienting the audience but not Jeff Tweedy, who puts everything back in order at the end.
How to Fight Loneliness is a masterpiece of elegance, with organ chords and a refined keyboard solo (played by Pat Sansone). It makes you want to drive on the highway at night at 150 km/h and crash into the first tree. It confirms itself, in my opinion, as one of the most beautiful songs by Wilco.
Once the anger is over, the obsession of Bull Black Nova comes, which perhaps lacks a bit of desperation at the end, but remains unsettling nonetheless.
I might have cried a bit during Reservations, but don't tell anyone.
The new single follows Love Is Everywhere (Beware), just to catch our breath before the moment everyone waits for: Impossible Germany with its guitar chorus and the usual Nels Cline. The audience applauds wildly, Jeff Tweedy takes off his hat to the Maestro of solos.
California Stars is the last "campfire" moment with guitar and little else: a less sad ending follows, as Tweedy himself announces, with Box Full of Letters, the new Everyone Hides, and a throwback to Being There (Red-eyed and Blue, one of my greatest hits in the shower).
At the end of I Got You (at the End of The Century), the audience swarms under the stage for Hold Me Anyway and a version of Misunderstood that goes back to the original compared to what I heard live the last time.
The encore is a crescendo starting with Random Name Generator, the karaoke moment of Jesus etc., and then The Late Greats, Heavy Metal Drummer (always fun), and finally I’m The Man Who Loves You.
Bring me back tomorrow, I assure you it’s always worth it. Never the same, always entertaining, and they always give me a few heart-tugging moments.
*Speaking of Tweedy's guitar, reading his autobiography Let’s Go (so we can get back), I came across this definition: "
I need a guitar with strings that don’t sound like a twenty-year-old who wakes up at five a.m. and has a venti iced Americano and is ready to seize the day! I need strings that sound like me, a doom-dabbling, fifty-year-old, borderline misanthrope, nap enthusiast".
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