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This may be the best Eagles album the Eagles never made.
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It's an album of shiny surfaces and great depths.
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Wilco has constructed their most straightforward release in recent memory, which relies heavily on the inspired intricacies of a full-hearted band.
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A soulful, sad, yet ultimately hopeful document largely about putting a brave face in the midst of a dissolving relationship, indulging influences from Bill Fay to Charles Wright to Steve Miller, Sky Blue Sky is the rare, mature album where said maturity is seldom compromised by banality.
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The most musically direct and down to earth of the band's six-album career.
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This is mature, considered, powerfully expressed stuff, anti-hipster in its refusal to draw explicit attention to itself, commercially questionable in its lack of instant-gratification melodies and structures. What a breath of fresh air that is.
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Sky Blue Sky is Wilco's first step toward aging well, but it transcends transition and is an album that sounds right in its place and time.
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The closer you listen to the jazzy guitars, Beatles touches and easy, shuffling rhythms ... the more it transpires that Tweedy is simply allowing the songs sufficient room to speak up for themselves.
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Alternative PressIt's apparent it takes deft skill to sound this simple. [Jun 2007, p.159]
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Though it may not fit comfortably alongside any other albums in Wilco's catalogue, Sky Blue Sky is further confirmation that, even at their most retro, they're among contemporary pop music's most vital acts.
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Sky Blue Sky may find Wilco dipping their toes into roots rock again, but this doesn't feel like a step back so much as another fresh path for one of America's most consistently interesting bands.
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While the elders will rejoice this sober, satisfied, and craftily subdued effort, the younglings of the bunch, with their abbreviated attention spans, iPod shuffles, and demand for instant gratification, will declare the album a boring and lethargic affair.
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Sky Blue Sky is understated, erratic, often beautiful, disarmingly simple music; it really sounds like six guys playing in a room, and no doubt that's how they wanted it.
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"Sky Blue Sky" feels more collaborative than the past few Wilco records... The dozen tunes here reflect the more organic sound of a band playing in a room, with musicians turning ideas into grooves, which in turn become songs.
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Wilco has come up with 50% of a classic album and 50% of a merely decent one. Buy it for the moments you simply won’t hear anywhere else.
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SpinA near-perfect album by a band that seems, finally, to have found their identity. [Jun 2007, p.89]
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With Sky Blue Sky, [Tweedy] reclaims the pop-rock potential he ?ashed on Being There and Summerteeth.
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It may seem disappointing to those looking for further progress in one of the best American bands of recent times, but in the end it all comes down to the songs, and most of the ones here are little gems, perfect for a summer morning.
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It's certainly the group's most cohesive album in ages.
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Whilst the nostalgia-soaked Sky Blue Sky will cause consternation amongst those who backed Wilco’s brave efforts to bend the staidness of plaid-shirted alt. rock, it’s still arguably one of the most charmingly-effortless records Jeff Tweedy has ever spearheaded.
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All those self-consciously avant bits of the two previous albums have been ditched along with Jeff Tweedy's laughable lyrical abstractions in favour of tuneful, direct songs that at least seem to carry some emotional weight.
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On its own terms, Sky Blue Sky succeeds: it's tender, poignant and sumptuously textured, occasionally jolted into fiery life by flaring guitar passages redolent of Neil Young or Television.
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The production is straightforward, but the song structures aren’t; that’s where Wilco’s idiosyncrasies still hide out.
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BlenderSky Blue Sky often feels like the Dead's American Beauty if Jerry Garcia had taken Paxil instead of acid. [Jun 2007, p.103]
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Wilco hasn't forsaken its experimental streak, and the group uses it in the service of darkness -- or rather the threat of darkness.
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'Sky Blue Sky' returns to the original formula with which they made their name.
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Just about everything on Sky Blue Sky, even soft-shoe skiffles like the title track, will likely sound better live.
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Sky Blue Sky’s only ambition is to capture the warm tones of the early '70s rock FM they grew up on and clearly love. The execution is flawless. One can’t help but ask, however, “What’s the point?”
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 177 out of 213
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Mixed: 25 out of 213
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Negative: 11 out of 213
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Jul 26, 2019
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Jan 8, 2015
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Sep 22, 2011