Wilco is a band with a unique ability to appeal to multiple points of symbolic impact for listeners inducted into the band’s zeitgeist. The music concocted by front man Jeff Tweedy and fleshed out by his particular band of mates can reach out to the head, heart, libido, the catharsis-seeking zones, and elsewhere — sometimes in the course of an album, concert, or sometimes a single song.
As if to demonstrate that special balancing act up front, Wilco’s exhilarating concert at the Arlington last week (on October 13) opened with the strange brew of “Infinite Surprise,” also the opener of their striking new album Cousin — given an enticing production thumbprint by Cate Le Bon. The song is a conundrum and a seductive curiosity combining one of Tweedy’s simplest and most infectious melodies from the new album and an avant-psychedelic wash of sound surrounding that deceptive simplicity — courtesy of the ever-flexible guitarist Nels Cline and other forces in the band.
With that strange brew of a concert appetizer, Wilco’s game was fully on for two hours and nearly two dozen songs proving why they remain one of America’s great existing rock bands. And one of the reasons for their artistic potency is their willfully stubborn refusal to be easily categorized.
Culling material from many of their 13 albums, including many from the new one and also from the groundbreaking 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and 2022’s Cruel Country, Tweedy and gang kept delivering one-two punches to all the right places. Textures and rhythmic designs remain in flux thanks to drummer Glenn Kotche’s uncommonly wide palette of approaches and sensitive group-think touches from keyboardists Mikael Jorgensen (an Ojai resident) and Pat Sansone, who also tossed into some tasty standard brand rock guitar to contrast Cline’s left-field stylings, and John Stirratt rumbling artfully in the bass basement.
In the Wilco songbook to date, a body of work nicely sampled in the Arlington playlist, alt-country and a rugged rocking variation on Americana rub elbows with detours into some experimental asides and art-noisy interludes. New songs such as the sinewy brooder “Pittsburgh,” the opposites club of lost-and-found love songs “Evicted” and “Meant to Be,” and the chunk-punk-rocky title song “Cousin,” along with the almost Byrds-y “Bird Without a Tail/Base of My Skull” — from Cruel Country — amply illustrated the band’s state of artistic health in this post-pandemic era.
From the Wilco favorites grab bag, we got “Via Chicago,” “Jesus, Etc.,” and “Impossible Germany.” The post-psychedelia of the set-closer “I’m the Man Who Loves You,” eased into a four-song encore set-let featuring the natural singalong candidate “California Stars” (co-written by Billy Bragg, based on an unfinished lyric by Woody Guthrie).
Rearing seriously into the Wilco wayback zone to end the show, Tweedy and company launched into the cheekily titled “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” from the band’s 1996 album Being There. That existential anthemic rocker came out before the world and critical acclaim came rushing in to greet the Foxtrot album and long before the current lineup solidified the unique house blend that keeps Wilco near the top of the American rock heap, however we care to identify the sound. They remain outtasight in their own special way.
