MUSIC: Duke's Campus Concert Extravangza

Wilco is music you can die in. Coming off those nights when a pressing breeze sweeps across the roads and you dream alone running a hand across the rim of something vile, you just lose yourself. Everything seeping out of the speakers builds a coffin around you and you don't know whether it's the alcohol talking or that burned out feeling of life confined, but God damn it's something. Everyone who knows the slightest bit about music is whispering behind her back, droning Wilco this, Wilco that. Wilco is the underground it thing; it's the shit you know, and you ain't cool unless Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is hanging off your CD player. But damn if it isn't good. Then going back to 1996, the opening door, Being There, Jeff Tweedy singing, "Close your eyes and go to sleep." It's a resurrection of everything rock and roll, everything good and new dragged out of the soil and infected again with that disease of brilliance. When I bit into 1999's Summer Teeth for the first time, I was out of order, going "now" to "then" and to "in between." The middle album, between the magnum of Being There and the opus of YHF dropped my jaw. Wilco can play. They can put together in three minutes all the power of a rambling concerto, and they can lilt the sublimely mundane into a powerful impression, and good lord, "She's A Jar" is a song. "Pieholden" is a masterpiece that says Smile and eat your heart out Brian Wilson. People always talk about how Wilco keeps changing, keeps throwing curve balls, but it's an idea not too foreign. See, we go through life slowly changing but all the while unaware. I think I've been the same since eighth grade but I'm sure as hell not. But you take slices out and you keep 'em: a camp journal, an old yearbook and it's a preservation of the driving evolution in you. Tweedy and Co., they cherish that. I took out Summer Teeth after a good listen, threw in YHF, put it on "Kamera" and I just laughed. This time around you wonder how many revelations and wars they grappled with in the studio, coming to an end of new beginnings. "Jesus etc." will knock you on your ass. Those violins are not fiddles. Whoever labeled this band alt-country and set their career behind five years can go to hell. You'll call this band Radiohead via Chicago, you'll have some of the same reactions switching between The Bends and OK Computer and Kid A and you'll say it's the same damn trend - reinvent yourself every two years think of something new 'cause you have to. But it's more natural here, it's this band learning each step of the way, taking risks and saying this is the next thing in our sights. With the end being a whole fearless presence of what music can and should be. Wilco is music you can die in. Throw on an album and let the world slide away. - Charles Lin Oh, and according to Veis, I'm supposed to mention that they're coming for Last Day of Classes. Look for Wilco and Better Than Ezra, along with local bands Kenin, Spencer Acuff Band and Andre Buckner's rap group on the Main Quad April 23.