A fresh look at the sound of a (now) old group breathes life into Cousin, Wilco’s thirteenth album in almost three decades. Welsh director Cate Le Bon gives tone to the orchestrations of this album at the center of which Jeff Tweedy’s voice expresses itself with restraint and the same concern for the fate of a society moving forward with the headwind that defined the subject of the previous one. album Cruel Country (2022). The tone is set in the hubbub of Nels Cline’s guitars, which thunder from the first measures of Infinite Surprise in opening: Cousin will be an album of contrasts, enhanced by the multitude of small sound details, studio effects applied to the percussion. On the superb Sunlight Ends in the middle of the album, for example, the guitar and keyboard notes raining down on Tweedy: “ You’re not the kind of city street / Anyone can cross / You’re the kind of spinning star / That only gets you lost “, he sings, then lamenting a love doomed to die out on the scintillating folk ofA Bowl and a Pudding.
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