There are fourteen songs on A Ghost Is Born, but the critical deconstruction workers haven’t talked about them much, mostly because they (and most Wilco fans) are still rolling around 2002’s brilliant Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. That album reinvented this very good band’s very consistent sound – and did so following what may, in the end, be their best record: 1999’s Summerteeth – and came with an engagingly twisty backstory that included label troubles, personnel changes and a documentary film. So complete was Wilco’s sonic transformation on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that there’s a tendency to describe A Ghost Is Born as a sophmore album: the second album by the new band that recorded YHF and happened to share a name and some members with an earnest, smart band that spun off from Uncle Tupelo in the early ‘90s.
Chalk it up to sophmore jinxage or inevitable post-classic letdown, but A Ghost Is Born is not another Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, in style or execution. Several weak songs would never have made the cut on YHF; one of Ghost’s middling efforts, “Handshake Drugs,” is actually a holdover from the YHF sessions and was on that album’s online-bonus Bridge/Australian EP in slightly different form. But there are also a few welcome and likably loose experiments here that would’ve been similarly out of place on the ruminative YHF. Those pleasant surprises don’t make A Ghost Is Born its predecessor’s equal, but they make it, in some spots, a good deal more fun.
Ghost leads off with “At Least That’s What You Said,” and that song’s transition from Tweedy’s whispered, intimate-distant vocals (“you’re irresistible when you get mad/isn’t it sad, I’m immune”) to a raucous, Neil Young-ian guitar throwdown offers a hint to what the rest of the album bears out: the occasionally oppressive discipline of YHF won’t be found here. Proof positive of that comes two tracks later, via the propulsive, nearly eleven minute-long “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” which splits the difference between Can and Tortoise with jagged guitars and riddling, imageistic lyrics. Both of the above are long songs, but are well set off by the lean, light “Hummingbird” – a bouncy throwback to Wilco’s pre-reincarnation sound – and the insinuating “Theologians,” which balances an understated moodiness with one of Wilco’s biggest hooks since Being There. You’d have to look to Being There’s “Sunken Treasure” to find a match for Tweedy’s heartrending vocals on the brittle, beautiful “Less Than You Think.” That song has been discussed more than any other on Ghost because of its segue from three plaintive, blessedly simple minutes into twelve more of thrumming, sloshing noise. That noise – which Tweedy explained as a sonic syllogism to the migraines that sent him rushing into the arms of Mlle. Vicodin nine times daily (which, in turn, sent him shuffling blearily off to rehab around the time of Ghost’s release) – is exasperating because of its lack of focus, if not because of its nature. The fact that it’s followed by the near-perfect pop of the gently self-mocking “Late Greats” makes for a nice contrast, but I personally found that contrast nicer when using my “skip track” button. There’s also enhanced content that includes a two-hour live show from Chicago.
This record isn’t a full success, and it certainly isn’t the dark, resonant classic that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was. But by bringing the production sophistication of YHF to some intriguing and new-sounding places, Wilco followed a masterpiece in one of the two ways that can be done. One is to make another masterpiece; they haven’t done that. The other is to ignore the masterpiece altogether, and announce that what’s next – on this record, on the records that will follow – will be different, and perhaps differently great. It will be interesting to see what this Ghost grows up to be.
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