as was mentioned before, the new wilco dvd rocks and everyone should get it i think, it has a ton of bonus goodies!!
i like wilco a lot more than UT
and i also highly recommend the new Jayhawks album, Rainy Day Music!!!
About time we had an alt-country thread round these parts…
As much as I loved Hollywood Town Hall, I’ve been leary of them ever since Tomorrow the Green Grass came out. Is Rainy Day Music better or worse than those.
Try listening to Wide Swing Tremolo which, to me at least, had a more soulful sound. You’re right that they tend to post-produce their music more than most alt-country bands do.
Maybe it’s time to open a generic alt-country thread for us fans…
Thanks, I will have to keep an eye out for the CD. Reservations is one of my favorit YHF tracks. Shot in the Arm is a bit repetetive, but has a good sound. I happen to be listening to Summerteeth right now. 
I think “Rainy Day Music” ranks right up there with “Tomorrow the Green Grass” and “Hollywood Town Hall”.
Here are a few commercial reviews of the new album:
On to other things… has anyone tried getting the new EP off the Wilco web site? I put my CD in the drive and clicked on the little satellite dish, and all I get is a web page that says, “Check back for more goodies”. There’s a link there that says “Play”, but if you click it you get a 404 error on what looks like a FAQ.
I got as far as downloading the album cover, and below that there are links to download each MP3 from one of two servers. However, I’m getting “(songtitle) cannot be downloaded, FTP something or other.” Message, then the download terminates. Hopefully they’ll get it up and running soon. Possibly the server is just too busy since it’s the first day? Also, you need the code off of the liner notes from YHF.
I can’t even find the album cover.
Could you take me through the steps? When I click on the web site link on the enhanced CD splash screen, it just takes me to this url: http://wilcoworld.net/enhanced.html
If I click on the little satellite dish, it sends me to http://wilcoworld.net/clickdish.html
I can’t find any album covers to download or any songs at either of those URLs.
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Make sure you have Quicktime 6 installed. (Don’t know if this makes a difference, but it says QT6 Required.
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Click on the album cover. The player should pop up.
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Click on “Download the EP”. This will open a page where you put in the numbers from your copy of YHF. Put them in and click “Enter”.
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Now you’re at the page with the album cover downloads. Scroll down, and you’ll find links to both the individual MP3s and a ZIP file containing all of them. The zip file took a while to download. Note–when I unzipped mine, they all came out as songtitle.mp3.bin for some reason; hacking off the .bin made them play just fine.
Alas, I didn’t make it to Durham for the show last night–too much going on.
While I’m at it, does anyone else think parts of YHF seem to refer to 9/11? Particularly “Jesus, Etc.” (“Tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad sad songs”, “Skyscrapers are scraping together”) and perhaps “Ashes of American Flags” and “War on War”. It goes so far as to have two tower-like buildings side by side on the cover. Isn’t that particularly odd, since, IIRC, the album was recorded and turned in well before 9/11/01? No big conspiracy theory or anything–I just find it curious.
Click on the album cover where? On the web site? The Album cover that loads when you put the CD in the drive?
I’m wondering if the Canadian CD is different - None of these instructions make any sense to me. If I navigate to the web site by clicking on the “Wilcoworld.net/web site” link in the Quicktime display, it takes me to a page that just has the text, “Check back soon for more enhanced material”.
At the bottom of my Quicktime window is a link to Nonesuch records, a little Satellite dish link, and a link to Apple’s Quicktime download page. None of those three links takes me to any obvious download pages. The little satellite dish link takes me to what looks promising - a page on the web site that lists the tracks on the EP and has the writing and producing credits for them. But there are no links to download anything.
The only YHF album cover I can find is by going to the web site and clicking on ‘records’. But clicking that album cover just takes you to a page with track listings and an ‘order’ button.
Any more clues?
I was in St Louis a couple weekends ago. The Sunday Post-Dispatch had a big article about the UT re-release. Oddly enough, the person most quoted in the article was Mike Heidorn. There was one great quote, something to effect that “I don’t know why the band was so influential. We were drunk most of the time.”
if you type in www.wilcoworld.net, you’ll get to their front page.
Below the buttons for News, Merch, etc, there’s a link that says “Free EP Download Available.” Click on that, and you’ll get to a page with the album cover which you click on, opening Quicktime. At the bottom of the Quicktime player window is a button that says download the EP. Clicking on that should take you to the page that asks for the code from the YHF liner notes.
Boy, that’s strange. When I go to Wilcoworld.net, the only links below the buttons are announcements about their tours with Sonic Youth and R.E.M.
I wonder if they’re reading the HTTP header and only making the EP available to Americans? I’m in Canada.
I did just that! (This doubled my DVD collection, which before this consisted of “Phish Live in Vegas”.) The extra live footage alone is worth the $22.
As for the movie, I enjoyed it, but I thought it left a lot of questions unanswered. For instance, one thing I was curious about was exactly what the record company’s objections to YHF were. What changes did they want made? Interviews with some A&R people from Reprise would have added a whole dimension to the movie, though I can understand why such an interview wouldn’t have been forthcoming.
I also thought Jay’s separation from the band seemed to come from nowhere. I can see where Jones tries to foreshadow it, with Jeff and Jay arguing about the intro to “Heavy Metal Drummer” and a few digs the band takes at Jay, but a little more of the buildup would have been interesting.
Also, the band fired their drummer and hired Glenn Kotche (a fellow UK alum) right before filming started, but I don’t remember that being mentioned.
As a whole, though, I thought it was a nice (if incomplete) look at the making of the album and the ensuing dust-up. I’d recommend it to anyone who appreciates the album.
Dr. J
Yeah, I have it and it’s a great album. Minus 5 is a band fronted by Scott McCaughey, who used to sing for one of the best bands to ever come out of Seattle, The Young Fresh Fellows. Don’t get it expecting a Wilco album though… it’s much more Rock and/or Pop than Alt-Country. It has somewhat of a rotating membership including people from REM and The Posies (on occasion). If you get a chance to see them live, don’t pass it up.
Thanks for the tidbit. I had no idea that the Young Fresh Fellows were a real band–I just knew them from that They Might Be Giants song. (“She doesn’t have to have her Young Fresh Fellows tape back, now…”)
I thought Down With Wilco was very Beatles-sounding.
Re: my above comments about the movie–I read some of the director’s diary that is included with the DVD, and he felt the same way I did about Warner’s side of the label-dropping story and Jay’s departure (which apparently happened while he was back in California for the week). At some point I want to watch it again with the director and the band’s commentary.
Dr. J