Country-rock outfit Wilco explored unfettered wilderness with its Tuesday set at The Espee in San Antonio.
When the Current spoke to keyboardist and sound manipulator Mikael Jorgensen ahead of the show, he told us to expect deep cuts.
“Lately, we have been kind of digging into the catalog and finding some roads that have not been well-traveled, songs that haven’t made it on to the set list over the years,” Jorgensen said. “Songs that are still very viable and exciting.”
Promises made, promises kept.
Songs that caught the crowd by surprise included “Hints,” “Quiet Amplifier” and “Side With the Seeds.”
Another deep cut, “Cruel Country,” was especially apropos in today’s climate as the most ironically Americana song in the set. “I love my country, stupid and cruel,” frontman and chief songwriter Jeff Tweedy sang.
“That’s such a deep song! I don’t even know that song,” a woman in the audience told her friend. “I love discovering new songs at a concert.”
Wilco also explored tracks in its early catalogue.
“The lyrics to this song are as old as the Alamo,” Tweedy said before launching into “Bird Without a Tail / Base of My Skull.”
The oldest song played in the set, however, was “Box Full of Letters,” recorded for Wilco’s 1995 album A.M.
Eager to please an adoring crowd keen to sing along, the band balanced the deep cuts with plenty of better-known tunes, including “Impossible Germany,” “Jesus, Etc.,” “Heavy Metal Drummer,” “I’m the Man Who Loves You,” “Via Chicago” and “I am Trying to Break Your Heart.”
The band also played material from its 2023 album Cousin, including “Evicted” and “Meant to Be.”
NPR music critic Bob Boilen has called Wilco “the best live band in America,” and it’s no wonder why. The set was a masterclass in the peaks and valleys of a dynamic performance. Even the quiet moments exuded a driving tension.
Songs would devolve into cacophony, like the wild and dissonant drum solos by Glenn Kotsche in “Via Chicago,” or Jorgensen rubbing a pillow over the keys of a synthesizer for the calamitous unraveling of “Shot In The Arm.”
Several songs ended in 10-minute jam sessions, reminiscent of the Dead, which were lively and rapturous rather than gratuitous and self-indulgent.
Other moments in the set featured stadium-worthy dueling guitars, the droney tension of feedback, the country twang of lap steel by lead guitarist Nels Cline, spaced-out bizarro sound manipulation and sweeping anthemic delay over tribalistic drums reminiscent of U2. The tune “Hummingbird” started off with Jorgensen’s bouncy plodding on keyboard, harkening to The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields” or ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky.”
Somehow, the eclectic members’ disparate interests melded into a cohesive sound. Reference points are recognizable, but ultimately, Wilco just sounds like Wilco.
Jorgensen told the Current in his recent interview that he describes the band’s sound as “adventurous rock,” as it tends to “satisfy most scrutiny” as an irrefutable fact.
“It kinda just sounds like the six of us,” Jorgensen said, adding that he brings a love for Krautrock and funk keyboardists to the table, along with more expected influences, such as the forefathers of country-rock crossover, The Band.
It’s also doing Wilco’s dynamism a deep disservice to lump the band in with the amorphous genre of “indie rock,” a label which Jorgensen eschews as more of an aesthetic than an ethos these days, anyway.
It had been a long time since Wilco had played San Antonio, and the audience was hungry for the return.
“I think the last time we played San Antonio, most of you weren’t even born yet,” Tweedy told the energized crowd, who screamed in the lulls between songs, contributing their own sonic dynamism to the controlled cacophony.
