REVIEW: Wilco @ Boch Center 10/11

By Matthew Sensabaugh

The last time I saw Jeff Tweedy was a year and a half ago. The show was intimate. Tweedy was touring with an acoustic set for an upcoming album and an autobiography, all of which carried deeply personal insights into the songwriter whose band, Wilco, has been crowned by critics as “America’s Radiohead.”

But Wilco has never been anyone but themselves. Everything the band puts forth is played with intention, from a nice guitar-lick to a ballad superimposed over the sound of sonic anxiety. Wilco is not Tweedy’s songwriting outfit, but an organized hive mind where Nels Cline’s guitar solo or Glenn Kotche’s drum fill sounds as if they were written with Tweedy’s lyrics side by side to the band’s instruments.

Wilco played the Boch Center – Wang Theatre for their second show in Boston Friday night, the venue described by opener Daughter of Swords (Alexandra Sauser-Monnig) as a place with plenty of “naked people on the wall.” The place feels more like an opera house than somewhere to see someone sing about binge drinking and coping with death.

Yet that’s the beauty of Wilco. Their music carries such range in aim and scale that Wilco can perform “Jesus, Etc.” as if you’re 14 stories up in a cramped, small Chicago apartment, or a song like “Misunderstood” that can only be properly listened to in a 3,500-seater venue not unlike the Wang Theatre. That range is just as palpable on Wilco’s new album, Ode to Joy, which Wilco used to open the show, playing over half of the album through the course of the night.

Opener Daughter of Swords prefaced the show perfectly. “Holy s**t man, it’s so cool,” said Sauser-Monnig, who is also one third of folk-trio Mountain Man. “I just had my mind blown 18 times watching their set.” Alternating between a cappella and acoustic guitar, Sauser-Monnig performed a goosebump-inducing set with music from her solo debut, Dawnbreaker.

Wilco were in great form from the start. “We’re not playing for you, we’re playing with you,” said Tweedy, calling out some people texting during the show, and rightfully so. They were 3 rows back from the singer’s microphone.

Aside from the initial distraction, the concert ran smoothly. Kotche nailed the drums on “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” and “Via Chicago.” Cline was fantastic, breaking a guitar string at the start of the show, and alternating solos with Pat Sansone on “Impossible Germany” in a way that made me feel like I was 9 years old again.

That was the recurrent feeling throughout the night. My earliest memories of Wilco were going to and from school in the backseat of an SUV. Even after rediscovering the band, I still found myself singing along to songs I hadn’t heard in almost a decade. In that sense, it was an experience that could only be replicated by a college freshman lucky enough to have parents with great taste in music.

Regardless, Wilco had fun onstage. New single “Everyone Hides” was intermixed with banter with the audience. “A pack of light beer is kinda oxymoronic right? It’s Friday, get a case of real f**king beer,” said Tweedy, before admitting that he hadn’t had real beer in 20 something years. It was vintage Wilco, and the band knew it. The group asked the audience to pretend they had an encore in order to keep playing.

2 and a half hours and 26 songs later, Wilco played a show that was just as enticing as when they played Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to crowds of college students almost 20 years ago. That fact can only be reflected in the music, then and now. Just the tone of “Jesus, Etc.” is still copied and imitated by numerous artists today, much less an innovative approach that has helped Wilco continue to create incredible music. Wilco are no late greats.

 

Setlist:

  1. Bright Leaves
  2. Before Us
  3. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
  4. War on War
  5. One and a Half Stars
  6. Handshake Drugs
  7. At Least That’s What You Said
  8. I Might
  9. Hummingbird
  10. White Wooden Cross
  11. Via Chicago
  12. Laminated Cat
  13. Random Name Generator
  14. We Were Lucky
  15. Love Is Everywhere (Beware)
  16. On and On and On
  17. Impossible Germany
  18. Box Full of Letters
  19. Everyone Hides
  20. Jesus, Etc.
  21. Theologians
  22. I’m the Man Who Loves You
  23. Hold Me Anyway
  24. Misunderstood
  25. California Stars
  26. The Late Greats

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