This came out in 1999 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Back in the ’80s, The Doobie Brothers — rootsy rockers who evolved into slick studio wizards — had a unique method of recording: They put every instrument they could think of onto every song, then sat back and tried to figure out what belonged where.
Well, judging by their CD Summerteeth, Jeff Tweedy and his band Wilco — a very different but decidedly rootsy breed of rockers who are evolving into a their own variety of studio wizards — subscribe to a somewhat similar theory. This 15-track disc is so stuffed with instruments it could have been recorded in a music store. Looking for accordion? Try track 15. Jaw harp? Track 11. Tubular bells? Track 1. Banjo? Track 7, right between the muted trumpet and the Dixieland horns. The Doobies might be proud.
Thankfully, on Summerteeth, this bent for instrumental experimentation is all the slackerish and soulful Tweedy and co. share with the slicker Brothers. Lyrically, this powerful album finds the band headed in the opposite direction from commercial country-pop and feel-good anthems — down a winding country road to a dire heart of darkness.
It’s a path some may not want to take. “I dreamed about killing you again last night — and it felt all right to me,” confesses Tweedy in his world-weary rasp on the ballad Via Chicago. Or then there’s She’s A Jar, a failed husband’s lament to the wife who “begs me not to hit her.” In case you haven’t already figured this out, Summerteeth isn’t meant to beh the feel-good album of the spring.
But nor is it a total downer — mainly because Tweedy’s ever-expanding musical vocabulary has become as mesmerizing and dynamic as his lyrics. Here, it runs the gamut from Stax-Volt R&B to Beck’s Odelay to Pavement — sometimes in the same song. One minute, you’re listening to the Wilco you know, when suddenly a Spanish guitar, a Paul Westerbergian chord change or the echo of a Who riff jumps out at you. Songs that begin as melancholy, acoustic ballads evolve into complex, Brian Wilson arrangements with strings and kettle drums, or spiral up into space-rock cyclones.
All of which goes to show that Wilco have come a long way, both as musicians and artists. And with Summerteeth, they’ve finally reached a place next to The Beatles and The Beach Boys as a band that not only know how to use the recording studio, but understand how to turn it into another instrument in their arsenal. All you have to do is listen to the music.
