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Sun Dec 14 2014
Review: Wilco @ Riv, 12/5, 8, 11
Whenever you see one band three times in a week it's going to reveal the best and worst of them. You'll experience why super fans stick around for years, and how someone seeing them for the first time can be sold immediately. But you'll also see how there's some truth to a lot of the negative things said about them. In the case of Wilco's Winterlude over the past week, the good definitely outweighed the bad.
These residencies come with high expectations. Wilco's had their phases. They can be alt-country, a little experimental or just a straight-up rock band. As Jeff Tweedy put it on Monday, coincidentally when he was least talkative, the goal of these shows wasn't to play every Wilco song. It was just to play a lot of songs. For a hometown crowd, they can afford to mix things up by running out a slew of drab songs in a row (i.e., Monday's set) or playing alternate versions of the hits (i.e., the last 3 or 4 songs each night being acoustic, "Camera" on the 5th) or playing rarities from soundtracks (i.e., "Just a Kid" on the 5th, "Blasting Fonda" on Thursday). It's not like they're forgetting crowd pleasers like "I Got You" or "Heavy Metal Drummer."
For super fans who have seen the band a lot, hearing rare stuff is a nice treat because it's not "I'm the Man Who Loves You" again. However, every show is someone's first - the kid with his parents, the out-of-towner who goes on a whim, etc. Balancing a setlist to appeal to everyone isn't easy, but it's hard to argue with many of their selections. And, like on Thursday, Tweedy had to acknowledge that sometimes the transitions can be a little ridiculous.
Really, they're just a local band answering high demand with a bunch of shows that veer from the standard sets. When they're locked in, they're terrific. Even if Monday was a snoozefest to start, it ended on high notes from the last song of the set ("Spiders") through both encores with energy that came out of nowhere. It's sort of amazing to see a band turn from lifeless to vibrant in a matter of minutes. Not many can do that. They picked me up from a grouchy mood (bad view, stuck in the smoking section, surrounded by chatterboxes) to walking out with a smile. (But I still want to know what the deal is with the guy who knew every word to the Mermaid Avenue songs yet clapped out of time.) And Thursday's show was a tour de force highlighted by not-so secret weapon Nels Cline crushing it on guitar, especially on the blistering close to "Hotel Arizona." "Hoodoo Voodoo" to start the encore was a hell of a time, too.