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100On almost every level, Jeff Tweedy and Co. have concocted the perfect follow-up to an epochal, career-defining record--taking greater risks and yielding deeper rewards--and finding more challenging ways to channel pain that just won't quit.
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100A Ghost Is Born feels like a band learning to be spontaneous and unencumbered, and coming up with their most engaging album yet. [Album of the Month, Jul 2004, p.94]
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100Unlike the first three Wilco albums and even more than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost is Born requires careful listening.
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91Feels more timeless, more effortless. [#11, p.91]
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What makes Ghost succeed so magnificently... is how the directness, the openness of the lyrics in general, is so beautifully matched to the damaged music, which is itself rife with symbolism and meaning.
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90If Foxtrot's songs were fractured pop, then Ghost is just plain fracture, a soft and brutal self-examination that pulls no punches even as it manages to remain carefully elliptical.
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90Every aspect of the project is an improvement on the last.
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A work like this is only self-indulgent if its accoutrements aren't justifiable. Wilco makes every note count on this album: however miraculously, it all manages to cohere. And the songs are undeniably stunning.
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For the most part, Ghost channels its shaggy sound into pop music. True, it's pop music that constantly threatens to erupt into noise or fade into silence, but it's still hard not to hum along.
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The songs are structured firmly in the classic tradition, evoking Dylan, the Band, Hendrix and Beatles. They're enriched by a bottomless well of melodic invention and find an emotional core in Tweedy's shy, plaintive vocals. [20 Jun 2004]
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83If the album weren't so agreeably off-kilter--short, whispery tunes alternate with long, rambling epics--its mix of guitars and piano would almost seem like the stuff you'd hear on rockers like Layla or Abbey Road.
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80This time, as well as simply delivering the goods, Wilco come bearing a basket of extras.
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80The flaws in A Ghost is Born are almost as interesting as the album's considerable triumphs.
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A Ghost Is Born hardly sound[s] like a retread of YHF, but the languid, ghostly song structures, the periodic forays into dissonance and the pained, hesitant vocals from Jeff Tweedy that were so much a part of that album also take center stage here.
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80Even more meandering than its celebrated, if somewhat cold, predecessor. It's also more confident, more coherent, yielding an all-enveloping warmth that's entirely resistant to any iPod shuffle function. [Jul 2004, p.119]
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Where Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sounded dense and surreal, the bulk of Ghost is spare and earthy, with streaks of Crazy Horse, the Band, the Beatles and the Replacements.
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80This is a dramatic, ambitious album that dares you to rise to its challenge.
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80Musically and lyrically, A Ghost Is Born is translucent, weightless, supernatural, capable of drifting back and forth across rock'n'roll's state lines at will. [#246, p.61]
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It's in the mournful, captivating, meditative, exasperating, pretentious, masterfully constructed experience of A Ghost Is Born that Tweedy and Wilco become true iconoclasts.
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Ghost is not a lot of fun. Still, it's an accomplishment, because it's an angry album.
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For someone [Tweedy] whose longtime strength has been songwriting over all-out adventurousness, many of the more traditional tunes seem, ironically, half finished. [25 Jun 2004, p.161]
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75There are flashes of Yankee's shimmer on Ghost, but the album is more elusive, more disjointed. [Jul 2004, p.103]
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Despite being one of the weaker albums Wilco has released, A Ghost is Born is nonetheless the most fascinating.
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70Its most difficult and uncompromising album to date.
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70Finds Wilco switching moods, tones, influences and instruments enough to suggest a band on a pub crawl in search of its winterteeth. [#64, p.112]
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Over the course of this album, you may laugh, frown, cry, cover your ears, or reach for the remote to fast-forward. But then you'll want to listen to it again.
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Wilco's ideas are unremarkable, but are worked out with intelligence and striking conception. And as it happens, the new organic emphasis tables some of Wilco's lamer stylistic obsessions.
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It's hard to imagine any of the suckers who fell for the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot hype striving to identify with, say, "Muzzle of Bees." Not impossible. Just hard.
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66In the end, the ambitious misfires and pre-coffee drowsiness of A Ghost Is Born don't ruin the album entirely-- they only serve as distractions that make it much more difficult to excavate the band's strengths from the surrounding detritus.
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It's like Scissor Sisters on tranquilisers. With a bit of ELO. And a dash of Ramones. And, with this eclecticism, a worrying lack of focus. [5 Jun 2004, p.57]
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60On initial listen, the album is rather monotonous, a bunch of moderately singable tunes with some noise piled up around the edges.... After the fifth or twentieth listen, however, A Ghost Is Born starts to insinuate meaning. [#27, p.132]
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It's important that albums like Ghost exist--but unfortunately, those albums don't always make the most enjoyable listens. [Aug 2004, p.116]
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A Ghost Is Born is a textbook example of an album created to fulfill expectations the band doesn't necessarily share.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 59 out of 65
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Mixed: 2 out of 65
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Negative: 4 out of 65
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8
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It definitely doesn't hold a candle to YHF, there's some great moments but it lacks consistency.