Jeff Tweedy asks to be misunderstood from the first verse, after the toddling rhythms and warm acoustic guitar strumming of "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" lock into something resembling a song. "I am an American aquarium drinker," Tweedy sings sleepily. "I assassin down the avenue." Huh? All diehards have their interpretations, but they should be premised upon the idea that Tweedy's lyrics are poetry. That's not in the sense of "so good that it's poetry" but in the sense that the words were chosen for their shapes, for shadows they cast, and for the ways they can be misheard.

This isn't empty, trying-to-be-deep evasiveness. It's self-conscious, afraid-to-be-honest evasiveness. Again and again, Tweedy returns to the disconnect between what's on his mind and what's on his tongue. The angst here, and there's plenty of it, is over the way that that disconnect is both self-created and agonizing. "Radio Cure," one of the album's stranger-sounding songs, puts it most plainly. On it, Tweedy addresses a lover who doesn't feel very loved. "Something's wrong with me," he confesses, and then lays out a dichotomy. His "mind is filled with silvery stuff / honey, kisses, clouds of fluff" but it's also "filled with radio cures / electronic, surgical words." He holds affection, but is too shy, vulnerable, or drugged out to communicate it. So he signals. It comes out all wrong. And the distance between himself and the person he loves just gets wider.

Even the seemingly straightforward tracks confront the challenge of being straightforward. On "I'm the Man Who Loves You" he tries to pen a love letter but botches it. The lounge gait and country fiddles of "Jesus Etc." back up the words of a man who can't even reassure his "honey" without his mind drifting to the apocalypse. The strum-along folk of "Poor Places" dissolves into the static-y, cryptic radio transmission that titles album—just another encoded broadcast on a record full of them. Two tracks in, Tweedy imagines a device to help him communicate authentically: a camera to "hold to my eye / to see what lies I've been hiding." Of course, the name of the gadget is misspelled as "Kamera." More self-imposed signal interference.

He sounds happiest over the neon power pop of "Heavy Metal Drummer," on which he reminisces about carefree teenage summers. It's crucial that the album's most direct track looks backwards. There's the shield of time to mute real feeling; nostalgia works as distortion, making the colors brighter, emphasizing the happy. Elsewhere, when he tries to put words to the idea of what clarity might look like in the now, the result is impressionistic nonsense. "Ashes of American Flags," for example, lumbers in a head-achey haze until a gorgeous bridge where Tweedy attempts, wooden-tonguedly, to envision serenity: "I want a good life / and a nose for things."