Lacklustre effort from the standard-bearer of thinky Americana

Ever been to see a mate’s band and regretted it? Like, their first or second gig. You know the lead singer, he’s talented, you've heard his songs acoustically before, the drummer’s cute and all, but still, somehow, you have a lousy time?

Nine times out of ten that isn't because the band suck. They’re just under-rehearsed. The songs haven’t been practiced enough times to properly figure out the best way to arrange them. These things take time.

Anyway, that’s the problem with Warm, the second solo LP from Jeff Tweedy, who you probably know best from his old band Wilco and the odd beardy cameo on Portlandia.

It feels like Tweedy ambled into a room with a guitar and an hour’s worth of new material – most of it pretty decent, to be fair – and his band are, on record, trying to figure out how best to jam along.

Go on, visualise the bassist snatching a furtive glance at Tweedy’s fretboard to fathom out the chord changes. Or imagine his drummer laying down the same generic never-fail backbeats, which, if only he had more time, he’d refine and hone and tailor to the song.

The overall production, too, has a rushed, off-the-peg, lazy vibe. Listen in headphones and you’ll hear what I mean; the two main guitars are aggressively, almost dickishly panned hard left and right. That wasn’t cool when recording engineers did it back in 1965, and it’s not cool now.

Let’s say nice things. Jeff Tweedy sure knows how to craft an arresting couplet. “I break bricks with my heart / Only a fool would call it art” on track two ‘Some Birds’, for instance. “Love won't show / It's a cold case you're never going to close” is also brilliant, on 'Red Brick'.

Keynote track ‘Having Been Is No Way To Be’ addresses Tweedy’s battle with both opioids and diminishing relevance, a dual struggle also explored in his recent memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), to which this album serves as companion piece:

“Now people say / What drugs did you take / And why don't you start taking them again?

But they're not my friends / And if I was dead / What difference would it ever make to them?”

See? The songs are fine. Great, even, if you dig slow-burning, dusty Americana. Lead single ‘Let’s Go Rain’ is fun, positing a 21st century re-run of Noah’s flood (‘destruction is an act of love’). His voice sounds increasingly like Plastic Ono-era John Lennon, which we can all get behind.

But still, lacklustre arrangements and two-bob production drag the whole enterprise down. Quite a few tracks end on a big major chord, as if the band are saying ‘phew, made it to the end, nice job lads, shall we go again? No...? Okay then.'

It’s a bright and breezy little jam record, but alas way too scruffy to hold up with the best of Wilco.

Perhaps they should have named it Lukewarm.