Loose Fur
Loose Fur
[Drag City; 2003]
Rating: 7.2
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