Wilco, “Cruel Country.”

Chicago rockers Wilco have always reminded me of a good football team. While the band’s chief songwriter, Jeff Tweedy, is clearly the quarterback, the self-effacing frontman has surrounded himself with a bunch of powerful players, each with his own skillset. During the band’s early years the other members could be counted on to offer up experimental sonic cover for Tweedy’s low-key self-reflection, or to provide the requisite elements for a straight-ahead rock song. And when alt-guitar virtuoso Nels Cline joined the team as a free agent, Wilco achieved a sonic synergy that would give Vince Lombardi pause—assuming he was capable of appreciating face-melting Americana rock dished out by a bunch of nice Midwestern boys.

Wilco’s latest, Sonic Country, for all its stripped down charm, feels less like a team effort, and more like a Tweedy solo album. While not quite achieving Tom Brady levels of self-involvement, it also a far cry from the “Super Bowl Shuffle”-level sonic synergy witnessed on Being There, A Ghost is Born and Sky, Blue Sky.

Listening to this as a longtime Wilco fan, I assumed that Jeff Tweedy had hunkered down with his acoustic guitar and cranked out a bunch of songs during the pandemic. However, a letter from the band that accompanied the album explained that I was wrong. Wilco got together earlier this year and wrote a bunch of country songs. “The tried-and-true became the ground on which to project the world’s hallucinations,” the letter intoned.

The resulting double album, Cruel Country, captures the band going back to its roots to discover something new. That old gambit. But listen, the result is nothing to sneeze at. Tweedy is a hell of songwriter, and right now is a hell of time to be writing songs. The album feels a bit like early Bob Dylan, where you got the sense Bobby enjoyed surfing the tsunami of social change breaking all around him.

But, frankly, those were better times, when the social changes roiling the waters seemed more positive, like an arc bending for justice. These days the waters are darker, and the times ahead perhaps more perilous.

“I love my country like a little boy, red, white, and blue/ I love my country, stupid and cruel,” Tweedy sings on the album’s title track, over twangy acoustic and syrupy steel guitar.

On the piano ballad “Many Worlds,” Tweedy sings, “When I look at the sky, I think of all the stars that’ve died.” For well-versed fans, imagine a double album of mellow acoustic songs like “Red-Eyed and Blue,” from the band’s 1996 album, Being There. In other ways, Cruel Country resembles Wilco’s 2001 classic, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—without the sonic experimentation.

The lilting vocals, cheerful acoustic guitar, and straightforward lyrical self-reproach of “Tired Of Taking It On You” feels like classic Wilco. Hardcore fans will no doubt love the latest offering. By the way, if you didn’t catch it earlier, the band wrote, recorded and will release this double album all in less than six months. So what if I didn’t get my face melted by Nels Cline? In fact, Cline’s got some pretty smoking country licks on “Falling Apart (Right Now).” I guess I’ll just have to take one for the team.