Wilco: Cruel Country review — Jeff Tweedy’s croon carries a pointed message

The 12th studio album from Chicago veterans Wilco began life as an “art pop” project, in frontman Jeff Tweedy’s description. But then the pandemic interceded. Sequestered at home in quarantine, Tweedy found himself writing folk and country songs. It was, he told Esquire magazine recently, “a deeper kind of consolation”. 

Some of these songs ended up on his 2020 solo album, Love Is the King. Others are now appearing on Cruel Country. Despite a quick recording time of just four months, it is one of Wilco’s longest records, their first double album since Being There in 1996. The doubleness in this case carries a sense of looping back in time. Our destination is the alt-country scene from which Wilco emerged in 1994, from the ashes of Tweedy’s previous group Uncle Tupelo.

Alt-country was the roots-music wing of US alt-rock. Uncle Tupelo were among its progenitors. They made links between the unfiltered sounds of punk rock and country, like The Pogues’ careering path through Irish traditional music on the other side of the Atlantic. Their home was Belleville, Illinois, an industrial town that Tweedy characterised in his memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) as “a lot of old empty buildings and a lot of occupied bar stools”. The perfect place for hard-luck alternative country songs, in other words.

After an acrimonious split, Uncle Tupelo were reconstituted by Tweedy as Wilco. He used to experience the alt-country tag as a burden, complaining that they could make an album of sitar music and “the byline behind our name would still say ‘alternative country’ or ‘American roots-rock band’”. But petty grievances about labelling have faded over time. Among the last survivors of an era when rock music was dominant, Wilco occupy their own space now.

After a period of upheaval, their line-up has been unchanged since 2004. Multi-instrumentalist John Stirratt is the only other original member alongside Tweedy. Nels Cline plays guitar, Glenn Kotche drums, Mikael Jorgensen keyboard and Pat Sansone is another multi-instrumentalist. Mainly recorded live, without overdubs, the 21 tracks on Cruel Country display the easy interplay that exists between this skilful set of musicians.

“Dangerous dreams have been detected/Streaming over the southern border,” Tweedy keens on opening track “I Am My Mother”. The reference to inhumane US border policies draws out the grit in the album’s benign acoustic sound, a portrait of a troubled America. “I love my country, stupid and cruel,” Tweedy sighs on the title track amid the bent notes of a steel guitar and an easy clip-clop beat.

Downcast lyrics about “death and doom”, as Tweedy puts it in “Story to Tell”, are softened by an urge to soothe. “In the hurricane’s eye, people get by,” he sings in “All Across the World”, while sunny country-rock banishes stormclouds. The style is more straightforward than other Wilco releases, but the songs are deftly detailed and have a beguiling flow. The band’s simpatico musicianship and Tweedy’s gentle croon carry a pointed message. Kindness prevails in Cruel Country, not cruelty.

★★★★☆

‘Cruel Country’ is released by dBpm Records