NEW ALBUMS
JEFF TWEEDY
Twilight Override DBPM
Gentle behemoth! This triple from the Wilco leader is a salve in stormy times.
By Fiona Shepherd
Jeff Tweedy: engendering communal warmth
SHERVIN LAINEZ
8/10
IT was novelist and critic John Berger who first posited that “calm is a form of resistance”. Who knows if Jeff Tweedy was channelling that sentiment while creating the gentle behemoth that is Twilight Override, but he has certainly responded to the maelstrom of paranoia and inhumanity unleashed by the second Trump term – what the Wilco frontman has dubbed “a bottomless basket of rock bottom” – with disarming composure, and a big batch of tunes for his fifth solo outing.
Twilight Override is a 30-song triple album of mostly mellow consolation, insightful rather than intimidating. In the studio performance video for “Feel Free” – one of four tracks released in advance of the album – there is a glimpse of a sign on the wall of Wilco’s Chicago studio, The Loft, saying: ‘It Could Be Worse’. The song itself is a seven-minute invitation to shut out the white noise and slow down, to lay down anger and concerns, “To fall in love with the people you know and fall harder for the people you don’t”.