Summerteeth

Description

EDITORIAL REVIEWS With Summer Teeth, Wilco transcend the alterna-country twang of their acclaimed earlier albums and creates what Jeff Tweedy calls - kind of a twisted pop record...a dark pop record. While staying true to its back-porch groove and plain-spoken poetry, one of the most admired alternative bands anywhere takes a step forward by taking a bite out of pop. AMAZON.COM Wilco's de facto frontman, Jeff Tweedy, sports a colorful past, one where he wrote paint-peelers dedicated to late Minutemen founder D. Boon as a member of the feted (and maybe fated) Uncle Tupelo and where he dolefully crooned Woody Guthrie lyrics on 1998's Mermaid Avenue. But Wilco's Summer Teeth shows hardly a tatter of Tweedy's herky-jerky postpunk intensity or the agrarian rootsiness that so often came in the past from him. Instead this layered album spreads its digits far into guitar-heavy Britpop, with full-group backing vocals carrying bouncy choruses and synths whistling over the melodies. The tunes sound like a crosshatch of orchestral plans and an execution drawing on Alex Chilton and Big Star, the Kinks, and, only distantly, Wilco's debut, A.M. "We're Just Friends" and "Via Chicago" stand as harmonized twists on ballad formulas, the latter recalling Mermaid Avenue's "California Stars" with the opening line, "I dreamed about killing you again last night / And it felt all right to me." So it's not always uplifting or cheery, but it's got dozens of surprises in a mere 15 songs. --Andrew Bartlett REVIEW Teeth is packed with poignant mid-tempo ballads that would've seemed right at home on a top 10 list in 1975. -- Entertainment Weekly With his knack for sing-along melodies, rocking arrangements and decidedly noncountry studio effects, [Jeff] Tweedy has strayed far from the fold, to winning effect. -- People See more