[Spooks] Nonesuch signs Wilco - YHF out in April

[Utility World (Hugh Stegman)]

Wilco has announced that Nonesuch Records has signed them, and picked up
"Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." Yes, THAT Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, E10, which we hear
towards the end of the penultimate song, "Poor Places," which starts off
with something that sounds like Russian time ticks.  Yes, THAT Wilco, the
folk-y edge-y guitar-y band that did two albums of mostly Woody Guthrie
tunes
with Billy Bragg, along with several discs of its own noodly things (one is
called  AM, and they don't mean morning).  Good news since Reprise decided
YHF was too weird, and refused to release it, at which point Wilco bought it
back and put it on the net for streaming, where it promptly won best album
on most of the critics' lists I bother with.  No, not the shortwave nerd's
critic lists (CONET retired the trophy there), the music critics' critics'
lists.  Maybe that's why the net availability didn't kill a new deal.

And so I've heard most of this thing already in MP3 and indeed it's the
shortwaviest album since Kraftwerk did Radioactivity 25 years ago.  Lots of
zingy noises and yeeps and stuff and a kind of a distant transmitter airy
(and lonely) tone throughout.  Very Zeroes.  These guys came up with the
post-S11 attitude last July.


-hugh

Hugh Stegman  NV6H   34N 118W
MT Utility World
http://www.ominous-valve.com/uteworld.html