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This time, as well as simply delivering the goods, Wilco come bearing a basket of extras.
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Unlike the first three Wilco albums and even more than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost is Born requires careful listening.
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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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If 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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Despite being one of the weaker albums Wilco has released, A Ghost is Born is nonetheless the most fascinating.
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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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Alternative PressIt'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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The flaws in A Ghost is Born are almost as interesting as the album's considerable triumphs.
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The WireMusically 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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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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This is a dramatic, ambitious album that dares you to rise to its challenge.
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In 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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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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FilterFeels more timeless, more effortless. [#11, p.91]
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MagnetFinds 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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Entertainment WeeklyFor 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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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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Its most difficult and uncompromising album to date.
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Every aspect of the project is an improvement on the last.
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SpinThere are flashes of Yankee's shimmer on Ghost, but the album is more elusive, more disjointed. [Jul 2004, p.103]
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Q MagazineEven 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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BlenderOn 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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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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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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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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On 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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If 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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UncutA 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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New Musical Express (NME)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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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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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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A Ghost Is Born is a textbook example of an album created to fulfill expectations the band doesn't necessarily share.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 130 out of 140
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Mixed: 5 out of 140
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Negative: 5 out of 140
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Jun 4, 2011It definitely doesn't hold a candle to YHF, there's some great moments but it lacks consistency.
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May 20, 2022
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Nov 9, 2015