It seems apt that I first came across Wilco on the radio - it was "Can't Stand It", way back when - for their music feels particularly suitable to being heard drifting on the airwaves, perhaps from a car stereo or through an open kitchen window some sunny afternoon; of all their albums, Summerteeth is the one that most has that feel, and it may not be a coincidence that it's also my favourite of theirs.
Summerteeth is one of those albums that I think of very much as a whole made comprised of a few different mood suites, all flowing naturally into each other. After the pealing, joyous-sounding (the words Tweedy sings are rather less upbeat) beginning of "Can't Stand It" comes the record's best song, the dreamily elliptical "She's A Jar" (another with poetically ambiguous but distinctly uncheerful lyrics); it's followed by the first of the album's several climbing rock-and-rollers, "A Shot In The Arm" (probably the one that I'm most likely to get stuck in my head), which kicks off the 'fast' part of the album which also includes "I'm Always In Love" and "Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again)". (Admittedly, the 'fast' section is broken up by the sweetly plaintive "We're Just Friends", another particular favourite of mine.)
Then comes the 'quiet' part, beginning with "Pieholden Suite", followed by the faux-jaunty but actually rather sad "How To Fight Loneliness" and culminating in the epic, magnificent "Via Chicago". And then the final section of the album, which is a bit more uneven in tone and mood but nonetheless seems to lead entirely naturally to the penultimate 'proper' track, "Summer Teeth", which, I reckon (without being able to justify it) takes its skittering, sunnily declining tone from its first words ("Like a cloud/His fingers explode/On the typewriter ribbon/The shadow grows"), and then quietly unwinding closer "In A Future Age". (After a brief pause, we get the most straightforwardly friendly and golden song on the album, "Candy Floss", and a slightly different mix of "A Shot In The Arm".)
Taken as a whole, Summerteeth has, at once, a haziness and a clarity to it, a palette which seems comprised of both nostalgic sepia tones and thoroughly contemporary hues of grey alienation mixed with daubs of in-the-moment colour. The music is elegantly orchestrated modern rock with numerous streams of other popular music influences running through it; lap steel, piano, organ and other instruments appear throughout, always incorporated subtly but in a way that is integral to the song. It makes me feel both happy and sad in a mixed-up way that I can't clearly identify as either piercing or diffuse, but is undeniably strong; it makes me feel.
