Album reviews: Wilco – Ode to Joy, and Mika – My Name is Michael Holbrook

Wilco create an undercurrent of foreboding on an album informed by today’s global political climate, while Mika’s first album in four years has its own profound moments

US band Wilco (Annabel Mehran)

Wilco – Ode to Joy

★★★★☆

If you’re expecting Ode to Joy to be uplifting, you’d be – understandably – wrong. Chicago alt-rock band Wilco’s 11th album is very much informed by today’s global political climate. Subdued, stripped-back folk-rock instrumentation and a striding pace thread Ode to Joy together, creating an undercurrent of foreboding.

That rhythm becomes most ominous on the hypnotic “Quiet Amplifier”, which adds eerie, high-pitch strings, increasingly discordant faster-tempo acoustic guitar and muted trumpets to its ghostly, distant march. Occasionally the pace plods, as on “We Were Lucky”, with its extended guitar solos. But the album is lifted by the relatively upbeat “Everybody Hides” and “Hold Me Anyway”, and is more than outweighed by tracks to place atop Wilco’s vast canon. “One and a Half Stars” swells steadily into one of the album’s most affecting songs, layering harmonising vocals, arpeggiating synths and rippling guitars to the gentle strum and repetitive beat.

Ode to Joy follows frontman Jeff Tweedy’s three solo albums and an autobiography detailing his depression and addiction. Here, his lyrics indirectly capture the sombre mood of political distrust. “Bright Leaves” is about a crumbling relationship, with the chorus repeating “you never change”, while imagery, of a white cross on the roadside (“White Wooden Cross”), and “staring at the knives in the drawer” (“Before Us”) add to the general unease. Tweedy’s restrained vocals, meanwhile, are as dignified as the minimal music, their honesty exposed in unpolished edges.

But Ode to Joy is also about finding succour in bleak times. This is a quietly momentous album of depth, soothing in its introspection. The highlight has got to be the bittersweet acoustic “Love is Everywhere (Beware)”. Written following the Women’s March, it inspires contemplation as circling guitar and a sprinkling of pretty glockenspiel and sliding strings conjure a message to make your heart ache.

“Nobody needs more Wilco music,” Tweedy has said, explaining his endeavour to make this album so meaningful. Ode to Joy is exactly the album Wilco fans need right now. Elisa Bray

Mika – My Name is Michael Holbrook

★★★☆☆

Mika arrived in 2007 like a sentient party popper, all Freddie Mercury vocals, boundless pop enthusiasm and telling big girls they’re beautiful. Over the years he’s become more wistful, falling in and out of love with music, his album releases becoming quieter and quieter. It’s somewhat matched the pop landscape, which has transitioned out of the unashamedly expressive gloss that Mika once perfected, and towards more downbeat, R&B-inflected cool.

My Name Is Michael Holbrook, Mika’s fifth album and his first in four years, is an uneven if admirable attempt to bridge both worlds. There is the requisite Mika sheen, most aggressively found in the thumping sex anthem “Ice Cream” (think “Milkshake” by Kelis, only enjoyably naff), and the slinky and ludicrous “Dear Jealousy”, which falls somewhere between Savage Garden and Steps.

But there are profound moments, too, such as “Paloma” – a haunting, sombre ode to Mika’s sister, and the comfortable defiance of “Tiny Love”. “My name is Michael Holbrook, I was born in 1983,” he declares. “No, I’m not losing my mind, it’s just this thing you do to me.”

Earlier in the same track, he sings of once finding life dull but that now he’s dancing. This is an album that doesn’t always hang together as a cohesive whole, but has moments that serve as a pointed and endearing reclamation of self. Who could have a problem with that? Adam White