Album reviews: Wilco – Wilco Schmilco, Jack White – Acoustic Recordings, MIA – AIM, and more

Also Meat Loaf, Teenage Fanclub and Maxi Jazz

Jeff Tweedy’s minimalist approach is just right for the bitter and painfully personal songs he has written

Wilco – Wilco Schmilco – 4/5

Download this: If I Ever Was A Child; Cry All Day; Common Sense; Nope; We Aren’t The World (Safety Girl)

Few bands incorporate the wide swings of style and temperament that characterise Wilco’s recent career. In stark contrast to the questing experimentalism of last year’s free download album Star Wars, the music on Wilco Schmilco seems diffident and restrained, mostly built around the folk-rock strummings of Jeff Tweedy’s acoustic guitar, with minimal embellishments. But it’s exactly the right approach for the bitter, painfully personal songs he has written here, which address the living and the dead, the loving and the lost, and most of all Tweedy’s own furies and frustrations.

Effectively, it is Wilco’s equivalent of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, from the opening expression of outsider contempt for “Normal American Kids”, to the wrestling sides of his character in “Cry All Day” (“I never took it so seriously/Oh, it was serious all right”) and the tormented “Nope”, where over an electric piano and guitar groove that is like a lazier “Come Together”, he admits “I can’t say what qualifies as pain” before bitterly pondering “Why kill a man, when you can drive him crazy?” The Lennon comparison is underscored by Tweedy’s delivery, particularly on “If I Ever Was A Child”, a gentle folk-rock shuffle with subtle dobro-like fills, that sounds like an outtake from Rubber Soul. But again, shadows sour the sweetness, as Tweedy muses. “I never was alone enough to know if I ever was a child” is just one of several heartbreaking observations that help these songs snag like thorns in one’s mind, like “I hope you find someone to lose someday”, and the crushing “Happiness depends on who you blame”.

The most musically intriguing track is probably “Common Sense”, in which high, trilling guitar and abstruse, angular guitar riff spiral off at tangents as bass and drums strive to anchor the song’s wayward progress, soothed at its close by vibes. But it is debatable whether an album has ever closed with as melancholy a sequence as Wilco Schmilco, with the oceanic ennui haunting “Shrug And Destroy” and “Just Say Goodbye” separated by “We Aren’t The World (Safety Girl)”, a dispirited response to the charitable nostrum barely salvaged by the glimpse of love: “We aren’t the world/We aren’t the children/But you’re my safety girl”.

Jack White – Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016 – 4/5

Download this: Carolina Drama; City Lights; Apple Blossom; Hotel Yorba

Drawn from all corners of his career, with the acoustic moments from White Stripes and Raconteurs recordings augmented by remixes and unreleased songs, Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016 makes the most persuasive argument so far for Jack White as a songwriter. There is a satisfying congruence here between the various threads of his oeuvre: the rollicking barroom busker charm of “Hotel Yorba” and “Apple Blossom”; the innocent tomfoolery of “Well It’s True That We Love One Another”; the haunted mystery of the the outtake “City Lights”, with its cyclical, intertwining guitars; and the Americana-manque murder ballad “Carolina Drama”, here presented in a bluegrass arrangement that casts a new shade over its frantic narrative. Despite the diversity of themes and styles, the sense of a confident single voice comes through much louder and clearer than before in this new context.

Meat Loaf – Braver Than We Are – 2/5

Download this: Who Needs The Young; Going All The Way

Braver Than We Are reunites Meat Loaf once again with Jim Steinman, who ransacks his back catalogue for material. “More” first appeared on a Sisters Of Mercy album, while “Loving You Is A Dirty Job (But Somebody’s Got To Do It)” was a flop three decades ago for Bonnie Tyler, as befits what is basically a title inflated into a cumbersome dirigible of a song. Steinman’s sonic fingerprints are all over the album – the furiously arpeggiating piano riffs (one “borrowed” from Randy Newman), the brusque guitars, the Wagnerian pomp – though it is Loaf’s stagey delivery, with that juddering vibrato, which dominates songs such as the grumpy “Who Needs The Young” and the six-movement, almost 12-minute-long “Going All The Way”, another duet with human megaphone Ellen Foley. It sounds so much more exhausting than once seemed the case, however.

Teenage Fanclub – Here – 3/5

Download this: With You; Hold On; The Darkest Part Of The Night

Six years on from the last Teenage Fanclub album, not much seems to have changed. The Byrdsy jangle and winsome harmonies of tracks such as “The Darkest Part Of The Night” and “Live In The Moment” retain their natural grace, while the band’s mellifluous, understated charm is nowadays applied more to reflections on growing old, the urgencies of youth replaced by the small mercies chiselled from maturity. A side-effect is the paring-down of emotions to simplest principles – as in the lines “It feels good with you next to me/That’s enough”, or in the “simple pleasures” and “sinful leisure” celebrated in “Hold On”. But the faith in fidelity and longevity is probably best encapsulated in the warmth of “With You”: “I will hide with you from sadness, and bad philosophy/I will laugh with you at madness, and learned stupidity”.

MIA – AIM – 3/5

Download this: Jump In; Bird Song; Freedun

MIA has claimed that AIM will be her last album – and justifiably so, given that the experimental sting of earlier releases has worn perilously thin. Producers such as Skrillex, Diplo and Blaqstarr lash brittle drum programmes to loops of world-music samples, while MIA dashes off facile opinions on familiar themes such as money, refugees, police and the internet – all simply punctuated with the response “What’s up with that?” in the opener “Borders”. Some of the backing tracks have novelty appeal – the cartoonish, kazoo-like loop of “Bird Song”, the Qawwali elisions percolating through the Zayn Malik duet “Freedun” – but the most striking work here is her virtually acappella treatment of “Jump In”, with just a sparse beat beneath her rhythmic vocal repetitions.

Maxi Jazz & The E-Type Boys – Simple…Not Easy – 2/5

Download this: Mass Destruction; Change Our Destiny

During his sabbatical from house-hop combo Faithless, rapper Maxi Jazz has taken the unusual step of indulging his love of 1970s music by forming a full-on funk-rock band. It is a noble ambition, though one demanding a certain lightness of touch sadly lacking in The E-Type Boys. Opener “Change Our Destiny” has the full armoury of jazz-funk weapons – slap bass, slick guitar, popping percussion and stabbing horns – but labours too heavily to propel them persuasively; and despite its overt references to Sly Stone’s “Stand”, “Like A Samurai” likewise lacks the limber grace of the Family Stone anthem. The reggae groove of “Mass Destruction” offers firmer ground for Maxi’s most potent critique, a refugee crisis commentary attacking the media for using fear as a weapon of mass destruction driving a wedge between “Caucasians and poor Asians”.

Johnny Dowd – Execute American Folklore – 4/5

Download this: Whiskey Ate My Brain; Sexual Revolution; Last Laugh; Funkalicious

Imagine if Hank Williams had mutated into Captain Beefheart, acquiring a bunch of primitive electronic equipment along the way, and you’ll get some idea of where Johnny Dowd is at on Execute American Folklore. The songs, narrated in Dowd’s ornery, fatalist drawl, feature his usual cast of hapless characters adrift in a world of mordant ill-fortune, but this time they are driven by mutant funk grooves crafted with buzzing, quacking synthesisers. “Unease And Deviance” sets the tone, harsh drum-machine driving its account of “twisted terror, vicious pleasure”; before the protagonists of “Sexual Revolution” and “Rhumba In The Park” suffer their below-the-belt blows. But balancing this is the maniacal glee with which Dowd recounts the detriments of booze and drugs in “Whiskey Ate My Brain”, climaxing in the album’s most wonderfully tortured burst of guitar noise. Gloriously deviant.