Wilco is one of those bands that has always been running in the background of my life. I’m aware of them, I like their music, but I’ve never been a huge fan. I don’t know why, really. Not enough time? Not enough energy? (Okay, there are reasons for this that I will talk about at some point. I have to.)

But I was reading Fluxblog the other day and came across this:

There is perhaps no musician better equiped to articulate the particular mix of sorrow, frustration, and fatigue of learning about yet another mass shooting than Jeff Tweedy, a guy who always sings in a warm but weary tone. “Ten Dead” sounds like late period Beatles on two hours of sleep, with Tweedy singing in a shellshocked near-monotone in the verses as he relays what he’s heard on the radio: “Ten dead, ten dead, now there are ten dead.” You get no context, you get no sense of what’s going on. All you get here is an empty feeling in the gut that you try to fill with the disgust and sadness you know should be there but is hard to access through the numbness of repetition and the abstraction of the situation.

It had been a while, so I headed over to Bandcamp and gave their new album Cousin a listen. 

Reader, I suggest you do the same. Maybe even purchase it if you are so inclined.

And keep reading Fluxblog. It’s well worth your time. (Listen to the survey mixes. If you need hundreds of hours of great music with very little effort on your part, you’re all set.)

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