Two questions. Did you ever go to a concert where the band skipped over your favorite song? And, is "Muzzle of Bees" anybody's favorite Wilco song? Why do I ask, you ask? Because Wilco, once one of the finer bands still in action, has a new live album on which it only does three songs total from its two best albums and nearly every track from its worst (and most recent), A Ghost is Born.
Second question: Wilco fans or not, would you really want to stand there for two hours and watch a band play noisy, empty indie-jam music with only the occasional interruption by a real song?
Wilco's new music arranges a very sick marriage between Sonic Youth and Electric Light Orchestra; somehow the band has found a way to make sounding ragged really boring. And the new stuff that dominates Kicking Television is played just about as straight as it gets: In concert and on record, the songs are vacuous skeletons both lyrically (the devil is chrome, you say?) and musically, like a bad nightmare about a worse Neil Young album. And they keep on writing 'em!
To be fair, Kicking Television breathes a little life into a few Ghost is Born tracks, but only a few. "Wishful Thinking" is beautiful, and it must be better on this than it was on Ghost is Born because I sure don't remember it, and "Handshake Drugs" is still a lot more fun than the rest of the record's dismal offerings. And the great stuff hasn't lost any luster; "Via Chicago" is still startling, and it's really the last time Tweedy could make lyrics like "crawling is screw faster lash / I blow it with kisses" not seem totally nonsensical, even though they clearly are. "Misunderstood," arguably their best tune, is well-represented here, and I'm glad they included a couple of the best tracks from the Billy Bragg-assisted Woody Guthrie lyric-pilfering Mermaid Avenue records. But these are small scraps of praise for a bloated double-length drone-fest such as this. Wilco diehards will eat this up for sure, but if I'd been in Chicago on the night this show was put to tape, you'd hear at least one loudmouth in the back row screaming for "Red-Eyed and Blue."
-- Reviewed by Paul Thompson
