Jeff Tweedy doesn’t sound any happier. I’ve always found the Wilco leader’s apparent discomfort in his own skin to be one of the reasons the band was capable of compelling music (although by no means always).

On “Solitaire,” one of the many somber, introspective tunes on Wilco’s self-titled seventh studio album, Tweedy sings in his trademark laconic style, “Once I thought without a doubt/ I had it all figured out/ The universe with hands unseen/ I was cold as gasoline/ Took too long, to see, I was wrong, to believe, in me/ Only.”

Does that suggest that Tweedy is now playing well with others? Or has he finally found the others that are willing to follow his vision. I’m guessing it’s the latter.

In any case, Wilco’s approach on the new album hews more closely to standard song structures than some of the avant-garde-leaning work of the past. Only a handful of songs really stick to your ribs, though, and only one will have you singing it in your head later. That would be “You Never Know,” the disc’s most energetic, uptempo tune, with swelling background vocals, a choppy piano part and a swooping guitar lick that calls to mind George Harrison’s breezier solo songs.

While the material comes up short on the catchiness scale, the guitar interplay between Tweedy and Nels Cline is full of imagination and beguiling texture: the theremin-like whistle on “Deeper Down,” the push into Neil Young-esque noise on “Bull Black Nova,” the razory slide on “Sonny Feeling” (the albums’ other sort-of-uptempo rocker), the pedal steel-style slurs that pop up throughout.

Tweedy surrounds the guitars with a mostly pastel backdrop that at turns includes tubular bells, organ, and the slightest splashes of strings and horns (to give the closer, “Everlasting Everything,” an epic crescendo).

In the end, Wilco is a worthy entry into their canon, but certainly not a classic. (Nonesuch)

“You and I” featuring Feist

Attention Wilco fans! The cover art for Wilco’s forthcoming new album, Wilco (The Album), was unveiled today.

Wilco (The Album) is out June 30 on Nonesuch Records.

See the album art below:

Best album cover I have seen in years.

Allen Toussaint: The Bright Mississippi (Nonesuch)

I’ve long been aware of Allen Toussaint as a New Orleans treasure, a prolific songwriter, magic-touch producer and arranger, and solo artist with a rather middling voice. I knew he played piano, but did not know he was such a bad, bad man at the keyboard.

I do now.

The Bright Mississippi, produced by Toussaint’s friend and frequent collaborator Joe Henry, is nothing short of a revelation, an album of instrumentals (save one vocal) that both honors and reinvents a number of songs associated with early New Orleans blues and jazz: Sidney Bechets’ “Egyptian Fantasy,” Jellyroll Morton’s “Winin’ Boy Blues,” Joe Oliver’s West End Blues,” and traditionals “St. James Infirmary” and “Take a Closer Walk With Thee,” to name a handful.

Toussaint and his dream band — trumpeter Nicholas Payton, clarinetist Don Byron, acoustic guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist David Piltch and drummer Jay Bellerose — play the songs with an expansive ease, rather than employing tightly wound improvisational free-for-alls often referred to as Dixieland. One of the album’s charms, though, is the clattering, march-style drums heard on a number of the full-ensemble pieces (”Singin’ the Blues,” Monk’s “Bright Mississippi”), imbuing them with an antique quality.

Toussaint has expert command of the Crescent City piano style handed down through the generations, and can deliver the rolling chords, blues-drenched licks, trills and cascades that are its defining elements, but he also has a songwriter’s sense of melody and a jazzbo’s feel for harmony that enables him to transcend the keyboard colloquialisms.

On a few songs, Henry and Touissant split the ensemble into smaller units, with terrific results, especially on a midnight version of Ellington’s “Daydream,” a piano/tenor sax duet with Joshua Redman. The horn players lay out on Django Reinhardt’s “Blue Drag,” allowing Ribot and Toussaint to play their instrumental elegance off of each other, and then the rhythm section steps aside for “Solitude,” making for an album-closing piano/guitar duet that concludes the disc in radiantly romantic fashion.