Schmilco

Though the album came out of the same sessions as last year’s looser, wilder, and intentionally irreverent Star Wars, there’s now a deliberate quietness and gentleness to the core instrumentation.

Without question, Schmilco is Wilco's quietest, most disquieting album. [Oct 2016, p.24]

It’s simply, as mentioned, unpretentious, unassuming, and crucially, good music.

Tweedy is a certified master of the simple, effective melody--time and again, he's built something grand from the pieces of something small, and trace evidence of this trick is splattered all over Schmilco. [No. 136, p.60]

a slow, mellow exploration of the middle ground between introverted and cantankerous. Yet somehow Jeff Tweedy and his band radiate warmth with the disheveled romance.

Wilco could have settled into being a comfortable, unchallenging arena-filling rock band, instead they’re knocking out marvels like this every year, constantly defying expectations and embracing change.

Their 10th album is surprisingly straightforward, its 12 songs concise, uncomplicated, largely acoustic affairs. However, listen more carefully to Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics and there’s a bitterness that’s at odds with the gentle instrumentation.

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.

Schmilco is also sly and great, but superficially it feels like complex, mid-life personal stocktaking.

The result is a moving, disquieting experience, sweetness and fear mingling together as the summer fades into autumn.

Even as another merely good Wilco album, however, Schmilco does pay plentiful dividends for listeners patient enough to discover its gradually revealed riches.

Schmilco is a deeply personal work. It’s also an album that so sincerely accepts maturation beyond supposed stasis, or prurient middle-age crises, that it should make us drop the term “dad rock” as a pejorative and accept that it can also be used as a description of high art.

Schmilco in particular is best consumed as a contemplative whole. [Oct 2016, p.94]

While unpredictable in parts, there are great melodies here to pull the floating voters in. [Oct 2016, p.106]

Schmilco is an acoustic record but not a slow one--thank God--which proves the right vehicle for the band’s loosest, most unadorned set of songs since its debut. There’s electricity here, if not much electric guitar.

Wilco has made a weird little folk record. It not only sounds different than the band's previous album, but slightly out of step with the rest of its discography.

As the album progresses, uneasiness is subliminally incorporated into otherwise deceptively easy rockin’ tunes. [Oct 2016, p.60]

Schmilco is much more understated and autumnal.

The songs, for the most part, possess more straightforward sonic architecture, and it’s also a much more restrained record.

Even if Schmilco isn’t Wilco’s most exciting album, it’s among their most consistent and immediately gratifying.

Schmilco is clearly music for autumn, meant for cool nights, crunching through the leaves, and the occasional dark night of the soul. And it speaks volumes about Wilco that they could make two albums so different within such a short space of time, and both times giving us music that sounds like no one else.

Wilco are at their best when they subvert their conservative impulses.

With Schmilco, Wilco are getting funnier, more surprising and more interesting, two decades after forming.

[Nels Cline's] noodling is nice and all, but it’s akin to casting Jason Statham in an ITV period drama. Worse still is the treatment of Mike Jorgensen, who has such an instantly recognisable sound on the keyboard; I genuinely don’t know if he is even on this record. Some nice fluttery percussion on ‘Quarters’ aside, the brilliant Glenn Kotche barely is.