Considering the pedigree of Loose Fur (sire, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; dam, Insignificance), one might expect a self-assured thoroughbred with Wilco's inventive savvy and Jim O'Rourke's art-school raffishness. Recorded during downtime on Foxtrot and refined in the two years since, however, this experiment mostly serves to reinforce what we're already well aware of: Jeff Tweedy's formidable strength as a songwriter, the pervasive nuance of O'Rourke's by-now trademark production, and Glenn Kotche's unconventional, sometimes overly ambitious approach to percussion.

Oddly, the most predictable elements of Loose Fur are its most "arty" and "experimental"-- songs that either follow the laws of entropy and dissolve in a rising swell of dissonance (opener "Laminated Cat") or defy them entirely, allowing melodies to emerge gradually from the sonic clutter ("So Long"). Despite its relative brevity (six cuts over forty minutes), Loose Fur establishes a familiar pattern early on, and it's actually the more conventional music-- exhibiting Tweedy and O'Rourke's common soft spot for classic rock-- that leaves a more lasting impression.

"Laminated Cat" will be instantly recognizable to Wilco archivists as a more sedate reading of the Foxtrot castoff "Not for the Season". In its original incarnation the song was a somewhat generic rocker grafted with an unfortunate sub-Brian Wilson arrangement; here it's a functional scene-setter drawn by loops of distorted guitar and gently evocative laptopery into an improbable seven-minute jam. Tweedy's lyrics are mostly incidental to the tidal pull of the rhythm and O'Rourke's otherworldly fuzz-- a stoner's recognition of time passing exponentially faster, years spent accumulating piles of books "not worth reading." Kotche's percolating thumps grow progressively (and predictably) louder as the tune ambles self-consciously towards the imploding plastic inevitable. Close, but no Andy Warhol-lithographed banana.

The Tweedy-helmed "You Were Wrong" fares much better, pitching squalls of dissonant harmonics over a relatively simple guitar/bass/drums groove, a piano stumbling drunkenly in the distance. The melody seems to hover uncertainly, then lurch forward in the clutches of some unseen gravity. Tweedy and O'Rourke are collaboratively at their best here, with O'Rourke's guitar chiming color commentary between the acerbic lyrics. "You were wrong to believe in me," Tweedy's dejected protagonist insists in a clever variation on the Pet Sounds chestnut. Tweedy punctuates the enigmatic imagery of the verses with heart-on-sleeve frankness in the choruses, an exorcism of the ghosts that stubbornly linger after a dead relationship: "When you leave, you're not gone."

Unfortunately, Loose Fur's chemistry is not quite as strong with the shoe on the other foot: Tweedy swaps cheeky non-sequiturs like, "You don't know where that phone's been," and, "Back in the saddle again," with O'Rourke on the latter's "Elegant Transaction", a hyperkinetic pastiche of guitar, bells, and off-kilter percussion. Perhaps it's unfair to compare O'Rourke's cut-and-paste songwriting with Tweedy's urban-troubadour approach, but the incongruity between the two can be jarring-- the pitched earnestness of O'Rourke's voice sounds as thin as Dan Fogelberg next to Tweedy's.

O'Rourke's "So Long" buries its rather lovely guitar figure behind a virtually impregnable barricade of randomly crashing and clicking percussion-- glass shaken in boxes, tambourines chattering, alarm clocks being wound, an unschooled guitar improvising ugly discordant figures in the extreme foreground. In direct contrast to the rest of the album, the melody insinuates itself gradually through repetition, overcoming the blatant wankery of the avant-jazz setup and succumbing to a chorus of lite-rock "da-da-da"'s right out of Stereolab and 1975. "Say so long to yourself," O'Rourke implores in the choruses, "it's so wrong to go on." And yet, go on it does-- for nine minutes, in fact, as O'Rourke laboriously pulls the song into focus. "Liquidation Totale" follows, a pleasantly engaging instrumental juxtaposing rushes of acoustic guitar with an urgent electric riff and pleasant detours on banjo and electric guitar. The song, however, does little but preface closer "Chinese Apple", again ending in a not-entirely-unexpected clusterfuck of noise.

"Chinese Apple" is Loose Fur's strongest offering-- by far, Tweedy and O'Rourke's most successful merger of art and accessibility. It even nicks a few lines from "Heavy Metal Drummer", recasting Foxtrot's Magnetic Poetry nonchalance in a pastoral twilight rarely seen from Tweedy since the rural melodramas of Uncle Tupelo. The track builds on a repeating guitar figure reminiscent of Nick Drake's "Which Will", Tweedy's uncommonly warm voice buoyed by the propulsive current of melody beneath. Suddenly, the music becomes much darker, and the sleepy-eyed flow of Tweedy's prose careens into an epiphany of impressionistic flashes: "Between the branches, flowering chance/ Fence lights rattling, fingers pushing through/ Slowly brushing past a fast glimpse of you." Acoustic guitars swell and accelerate; spectral percussion crashes distantly in the gathering storm. The heartbeat of the kickdrum keeps the vessel on course with its persistent lighthouse thump, and eventually the original guitar figure returns unscathed-- brighter, actually, more assertive. The song devolves gradually, with a descending keyboard figure reminiscent of Foxtrot's "Poor Places" and the ambient rattle of Kotche's brushes swishing like an outgoing tide.

Fans of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will no doubt find Loose Fur an indispensable companion piece, as much of the music found here occupies roughly the same static-frosted moonscape as "Radio Cure". Despite its deliberate obliqueness, Loose Fur illustrates with clarity just what Tweedy and O'Rourke were up to in those wee hours when Tweedy could no longer face the chaos of Foxtrot and Jay Bennett's endless embellishments. Given the option of editing together the best of a dozen-plus guitar takes for "Kamera" and horsing around with music as lovely as "Chinese Apple" or "You Were Wrong" with O'Rourke and Kotche, which would you choose? Ah, distance has a way of making love understandable.

-Will Bryant, January 27th, 2003