Sink your teeth into Summer Teeth

Summer Teeth

Wilco

Chicago-based rock group Wilco has created a minor masterpiece with its new album Summer Teeth. The reason for its greatness lies in the band's ability to change. Change and growth are subjects that Wilco's lead singer Jeff Tweedy knows a great deal about.

After an extremely messy break with his former band Uncle Tupelo, a band that wore its country influences proudly on its sleeve, Tweedy created Wilco. Preserving Tupelo's twang while veering closer towards a rock-and-roll sound, Wilco appeared first in 1992 with the critically praised A.M.

Commercial response slowly built and in 1996 the band released the sprawling Being There. Nineteen tracks spread over two CDs, Being There is an album tinged with a melancholy spirit. It is an elegy to small-town America. Songs such as the sleepy, acoustic ballad "Sunken Treasure," the jittery "Outta Sight (Out of Mind)," and the loping, breezy "Someday Soon," spotlight Tweedy's jumbled, sometimes goofy, always earnest, lyrical style. The album stunned the mainstream rock press and had the critics groping for praiseworthy adjectives; it landed on countless end of the year lists.

How was Wilco and singer Tweedy to follow up their success? As any restless artist does; by branching out and drastically changing their sound, again.

Tweedy declared that Wilco's next solo album would sever the band's ties to country music completely. They do this unquestionably with Summer Teeth, creating a set of surprising summer pop songs. Much has been written all ready of Summer Teeth's similarity to the compositions of Beach Boy Brian Wilson- this couldn't be truer.

Complete with back-up humming, organ, harmonica, and tinkle-piano, Summer Teeth could easily be a Beach Boys' album circa Pet Sounds. This holds true especially on tracks, "She's a Jar," "Pieholden Suite," and the album's title song which is underscored with bird chirps and a bubbling stream.

The influences continue. "We're Just Friends" is vintage John Lennon, "I'm Always in Love" is a nod to the ever irritating Weezer. What doesn't change is the music's melancholy tone; only in Summer Teeth it is less overt, having been skillfully weaved into the band's new pop sensibility.

If anything, Summer Teeth is Wilco's darkest album. In what could be the albums best track, "Via Chicago," Tweedy sings, unfazed: "I dreamed about killing you again last night / And it felt alright to me." Perversely, these lyrics are layered on top of one of the band's now almost standard, beautiful ballad melodies. The album is a fascinating contradiction. "Via Chicago," with its lyrics about murder and grief, follows the tango-tinged "How to Fight Loneliness," in which Tweedy gives straight faced instructions to his listeners to "smile all the time / laugh at all the jokes" and "fill your heart with smoke."

With Summer Teeth, Wilco delivers a slice of expansive, summery pop that continually satisfies. It's an album with bite.