Kicking Television

Having taken a couple of days off, I’m back with another entry (and notch) to my review of the best albums from Metacritic’s Top 200 highest scored albums. Today’s album is by Wilco, Kicking Television: Live in Chicago. This is a two-disc set covering Wilco’s live shows at the Vic Theater in Chicago in 2005. The majority of the record’s songs are taken from their previous studio album, A Ghost Is Born.

#182 – Wilco, Kicking Television: Live in Chicago (Metascore = 85)

Musically speaking, this album kicks off perfectly with “Misunderstood”. “Misunderstood” introduces Nels Cline (lead guitars) and Pat Sansone (multiple instruments) to Wilco records; Sansone provides beautiful accompaniment on piano on this track, while Cline plays some beautifully fluid guitar solos. While the record is compiled from different performances within this four-gig stint, the music is seamless (for the most part) in how it integrates together. While some of the stage banter has been edited out (detracting from the live feel of the album), overall the sound quality is very good. You hear the good and the bad, the in-tune and the out-of-tune, the rights and the wrongs. The band is locked into a groove in each of the songs, making this one of the better live albums I have heard. (Too many live album efforts have felt forced or disjointed or both, leaving me wanting more.)

One of Tweedy’s best characteristics is writing the songs, from music to lyrics. He injects the Americana feel of older Wilco material, Uncle Tupelo (his former band), the Byrds, the Band and numerous other rock bands that married country music with rock n’ roll into his songs. You can imagine the characters that he paints in his songs. For instance, I listen to the music and lyrics of “Handshake Drugs” and am transported to the cab carrying me to the dealer downtown. Any good songwriter puts you in the shoes of the character in the song. Tweedy has been good at this for a long time.

My highlights on disc 1 are “Misunderstood”, “Company in My Back”, “The Late Greats”, “Handshake Drugs”, “Shot in the Arm”, and “Jesus, Etc.”. The cool thing about disc 1 is that it showcases Wilco’s various musical influences, from the original alt-country roots that fueled earlier releases to modern rock to soul (a la “I’m the Man Who Loves You”). I also think Disc 1 was the more relaxed effort, and I got into the grooves a lot easier.

Disc 2 opens with “In Chicago”, a free-spirited rock ballad that meanders between melodic and dissonant. This actually is one of the negatives to this album overall; while many of the songs are elegantly arranged and melodically magical, some of the pieces have long periods of noodling that becomes tiresome over time. While these are few and far between, they are still there (probably explains the reason for the ranking). My highlights on disc 2 are “Hummingbird”, “One by One”, “Airline to Heaven”, “Ashes of American Flags”, “Poor Places”, and “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”.

Overall, I enjoyed listening to this set. I believe the rank and scores are justified, because even though the record is great, there are some flaws in the lack of stage banter with the crowd, and some of the songs tend to go long after a while. Still, this was a fun record to listen to.