Jeff Tweedy – Twilight Override – Album Review
by Killian Laher

Jeff Tweedy has a few solo albums under his belt, as well as multiple Wilco albums, but this is his first triple album.  It’s divided into 3 discs, which appear to be signified by new moon, half moon and full moon.  Initially, it sounds like a lot of the album is very much Tweedy in his comfort zone.  There are a lot of rootsy strums – One Tiny Flower, Caught Up In The Past, Out In The Dark and many, many more.  But when you scratch the surface of the likes of Betrayed, what seems like a kind of jaunty song becomes something else, ending with a bit of a scratchy guitar workout.

It’s the departures from this that are the real standouts.  On Parking Lot, Tweedy talks through over simple yet haunting guitar picking with a gentle keyboard at the back as he says, “I’d like to teach the world to sing… fuck…. anything”.  Forever Never Ends sounds like he got a big gang in the studio to sing the chorus, and it’s kind of endearing.  Mirror consists of a scratchy guitar and not much else, and it’s excellent.  Later, Lou Reed Was My Babysitter channels the late Lou Reed from a very specific time; it sounds just like something that could have been on the Velvet Underground’s Loaded album.  And he does this very well.

When Tweedy and co keep it simple, the songs really work.  Love Is For Love has great guitar picking on a downcast melody, and the moody, countrified Over My Head (Everything Goes) is in a similar vein.  Throwaway Lines is very muted, a stripped-down piece.

It’s the touches of colour that lift this album.   KC Rain (No Wonder) has a lovely electric solo, and Better Song is enhanced by the scratchy background guitar, while there’s a kind of warped guitar noodling in the middle of New Orleans.  And Feel Free is 7 minutes of sparse guitar and Tweedy throwing in lines like “say you’re full when we know you’re empty”, and later “let it be or let it bleed, John or Paul, Mick or Keith”  – lines to just luxuriate in.  Some of it is a bit too simple; Amar Bharati hasn’t much to it.

The ramshackle Wedding Cake has pleasingly off-kilter guitar and Ain’t It A Shame and Too Real start out as low-key tracks until you get to the excellent guitar work in the middle.  For a triple album of thirty (!) songs, it’s hard not to feel your attention wandering.  Funny, the last song is called Enough, one which nods to the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset.

Many of them feel interchangeable, and they don’t seem like anything new from Tweedy.   But you have to live with it, have to work with it, and the subtleties reveal themselves, and the playing across the album is excellent.  The closest thing in Wilco’s back catalogue is Cruel Country, but you do find yourself longing for the more experimental side of Wilco, or at least a bit of Nels Cline.

Out In The Dark