WILCO Vinyl & CDs

Review: The latest album from Chicago rock legends Wilco leans deep into Americana and alt-country - detouring from the more in-betweeny sound that made them famous, yet also detourning a generic sound they've come to be known as part of. Made almost entirely of live takes, the LP was created with all six members of the band brought together for songwriting duties for the first time since 2011. Echoes of Bob Dylan, twang guitar, slide guitar on the stereo, and all manner of additional country music tropes reveal themselves on an album that slowly reveals itself to be much more than just the sum of its stylistic parts.

Review: Wilco's first studio album in three years, "Sky Blue Sky" has been perhaps the most ardently awaited release of 2007. Eager fans had taken to shouting out pleas for information to bandleader Jeff Tweedy during his recent solo acoustic tour, and the web chatter has been virtually deafening. On "Sky Blue Sky" Tweedy's lyrics deal forthrightly with romantic separation and reconciliation, their bittersweet quality giving way, as the album progresses, to a more uplifting, redemptive mood. Tweedy quite literally banishes the darkness on the penultimate track, the inspiring, gospel-tinged "What Light".