Top 25 Albums Of The Decade (#13)

13) WILCO – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)

Another album that will make a fuckton of decade’s-best lists, and with good reason. I can think of no other 00s band that said “fuck it” more loudly and confidently than Wilco did when they recorded their fourth album. The heads at Reprise Records must feel like jackasses right now (they refused to release it), but not nearly as much as I do for having ignored this album for so long. I guess it’s similar to the Modest Mouse Effect, when a band has such a stupid name that I utterly refuse to take them seriously. That, along with a bit of the Arcade Fire too-popular-for-their-own-good syndrome that I described earlier. Clearly I had no idea what I was missing. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, despite being deemed “experimental” and “non-commercial,” isn’t really much more than a highly-ornamented pop album, though they do their damndest to fool you. This is perfectly encapsulated in the opening track “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” a seven-minute paen to aloofness without a chorus, where all the interesting parts take place between the verses—dissonant pianos, glockenspiels, bells, a King Crimson reference, kettle drums, frying pans, half-filled wineglasses, bootheels, etc. And, of course, the obligatory two-minute wierdo fadeout. Oh yeah, and it happens to be one of the catchiest songs I’ve ever heard (it was the bane of my existence for the whole month of September). Not that Wilco make it easy for you or anything. Just take “Radio Cure,” where Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett don’t even bother hitting us with a hook until the song is long-since unsalvageable. Or “Reservations,” a boyfriend-to-girlfriend song that I’d normally hate were it not for the foggy final minutes meant for acquainting the forehead with the steering wheel. In other words, they generate just enough eccentricity to keep from being saccharine, or—Christ forbid—radio friendly. In some alternate reality I might have discovered this record back when it came out (there were certainly opportunites, and I even dug the cover) and, who knows, could’ve become a huge Neko Case fan by now. But on those days when I believe in destiny, I sort of think that I wasn’t supposed to appreciate this until after I’d already been exposed to Deathspell Omega and everything else that evokes existential terror. Because, otherwise, I might not have missed those heavy metal bands at all.