wow, tuesday was a good day for in-the-car music. it suppose my luck was cosmically meant to balance out the fact that every other aspect of my life was totally and randomly ruined and obliterated yesterday.
as he types, still-drying black fingernail polish dripping onto the keys.
so, on tuesday i pulled a near-perfect ghost is born-era wilco soundboard, and an incredibly varied yet gorgeous '94 phish show. i'll be reviewing the phish later, as i still have one disc left to listen to.
setlist for wilco is here.
so usually what current-era wilco does is center their main set around whatever newer material they're most excited about at the time, and then they follow that with two encores (the definitely-two-encores-all-the-time thing is something i've never really understood, but oh well) that revisit a lot of older, being there-era songs (for all the "old school" fans who apparently want all their wilco to sound exactly the same). that formula normally makes a great show all by itself, but here they twist that formula a bit, and to great effect.
the main set is almost all ghost is born material, and it's played with a mix of screeching, crunchy big guitars and that harrowing screaming noise jamming that the band really started scaling back in '07-'08. '05-'06 is probably my favorite for the band (was there something in the air in 2006?), so i guess i'm biased here, but in this show they play the ghost tracks enough like the studio arrangements to communicate the songs' subtle details while deviating (mostly by making the guitars a little heavier) from those arrangements just enough to make things interesting.
interspersed perfectly with the ghost songs are a few old, toned-down staples, that after the torrents of noise and crunch come like breaths of folky-fresh air. "should have been in love", "always in love", and "shot in the arm" fill in nicely in this role. the main set closes with "reservations" coming out of an absolutely harrowing "poor places" jam, and then segues into an exceptional "spiders".
the first encore goes by pretty much as expected, save for a "misunderstood" that's worth noting, as it's played with the amount of intense noise and dissonance present on the amazing album version, which is something i've rarely heard from '98-'03 wilco.
the second encore is seven songs long, and includes a rendition of "bob dylan's beard" and covers of "comment" and a note-for-note-perfect "don't fear the reaper".
i'm just going to leave it at that. because that's amazing.
on a scale of 1 to 10, this show, like my fender hot rod deluxe amp, goes up to 12.
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