Warm

Jeff Tweedy clearly spent more time than usual talking to himself of late, and the expressive results are strong. His memory went jogging and kicked up enough dust that he had to put it down on paper and on tape, and it all feels like the most direct pathway into his complex psyche that he's ever offered.

What materializes is a confounding collection of literary mastery, intertwined with sparse, albeit flummoxing instrumental compositions--tender acoustic and slide-guitar arrangements, adroitly managed bursts of noise, and a rhythm section that puts the movements of life into a neat, cohesive order.

Alive and inspired, WARM is a different type of reinvention--as daring as Wilco’s early landmarks but more subtle and sustainable. He’s not trying to break your heart. He just is.

It’s the work of a seasoned songwriter proving that he’s as good at penning powerful, personal songs in a traditional vein as he is layering records with bells and whistles.

These are ultimately, however, personal stories that are elevated by their universal nature.

Thirty years into his career, Warm shows that Tweedy is as absorbing as ever.

This record comes on like the voice of a friend, confessional and familiar-- full of small, important reassurances.

When he sings, he doesn't seem to be singing from some ivory tower. And when stripped of the confines of a band dynamic, that relatability is even more naked and genuine. Warm is Tweedy unfiltered, a gift that begs to be shared.

Warm is an easeful record: it offers its appeal without supplication, or insistence. It’s really rather lovely.

In its own quiet way, Warm is one of the most powerful works of Tweedy's career, and it's the sort of music too many of us need today.

If his longstanding difficulties and insecurities were always present just barely beneath the surface on Wilco’s classic records, they are starkly prominent and central to what is often a deeply moving new LP.

Is the exchange of restless turmoil for quietly focused introspection a worthwhile trade? Depends. For Wilco fans who never really got over the big hooks and sonic clamor of Summerteeth, probably not. For listeners who have taken pleasure in Tweedy’s continuing evolution, WARM is akin to a gift.

WARM sees this industrious figurehead of intelligent American rock return to a form where he can balance these two extremes effortlessly and make the deeply personal sound thoroughly universal in a manner that is unlikely to leave cold anyone with a heart that is still beating.

As the lovelorn ‘From Far Away’ floats by, desolate and broken, haunted by the ghosts of art-rock guitars and phantom electronics, it’s clear that Jeff Tweedy still isn’t comfortable on well-trodden roads and that Warm has moments that upend Americana as beautifully as ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ did with US indie rock. One to let simmer.

Tweedy might be missing his band members, but the restless, resonant spirit that drives Wilco’s best records seeps winningly into WARM just the same.

It's a journey beyond self-consciousness and towards mature vulnerability, to an evolved idea of what is musically pure. [Jan 2019, p.82]

Every one [of the songs on] here is a gem. [Jan 2019, p.107]

It's a tender manifesto of self-doubt, a shout fading into a murmur. [Jan 2018, p.16]

He makes the 11 songs on Warm (dBpm Records) sound effortless, sprinkled with Byrds-gone-country twang and touches of ambient dreaminess and acid-tinged atmospherics.