A little touch of Wilco - Schmilco

It's perhaps ironic that the band once tagged 'the American Radiohead' should have pulled off something of a Radiohead with this, their tenth album. Not that Wilco have gone all Kid A on us with Schmilco, but in producing a record as muted and apparently reticent, they've (presumably) inadvertently mirrored the similarly understated mood of their supposed British counterparts' swoonfully good Moon Shaped Pool from earlier this year.

For some, these things are a big deal. Jeff Tweedy and friends' breakthrough in the mid-90s, a period culminating in the landmark Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, pitched Wilco as an eclectic alt-rock band, pointing in interesting directions ranging from The Beatles to the American New Wave. Last year's streamed album Star Wars returned to these contrarian origins, but Schmilco, recorded in the same sessions, ploughs a more conventional furrow, rarely straying from the softly-strummed and contemplative. Not that there is anything bad about that.

Indeed, Schmilco comes across as the intentional comedown after Star Wars, and none more so than the backdoor jam of Normal American Kids, which sets the tone for the 12-track collection with Tweedy's mockingly self-resentful quips about simply not fitting in. Continuing the theme of childhood acceptance, If I Ever Was A Child romps briskly through its two minutes and 56 seconds with a countrified jaunt that has overtones of the legendary Harry Nilsson, whose album titles Schmilco doffs its cap to. The pace picks up further with Cry All Day, threatening to get rockier still, but maintaining restraint, despite seemingly releasing pent-up irritation at someone with lines like "I'm sick of your affliction, but you're just a smart ass and blind".

If Wilco have endured comparisons over the years with The Beatles, they should have no complaint about this coming up again with Nope. Their case isn't helped by the uncanny similarity between Tweedy's voice and John Lennon's, and the sort of scratchy blues the Fabs' regularly explored in their latter years. And, at a pinch, you can hear traces of Come Together, and again, I'm not complaining - far from it. Someone to Lose, with its wiggy guitars and laid-back rock, has similar Beatley moments, as does the wry Happiness, with the slap-back treatment of vocals and drums bringing Tweedy closer to Lennon than ever. It might sound lazy to make such a comparison, but given how much we've been deprived by both the Beatles' truncated career as a band, and Lennon's tragically truncated life, it's actually a joy to have a band as subtly inventive as Wilco pick up the baton.

The tracks are mostly short and sweet - Quarters is mostly instrumental - as if the result of improvised jams. With some bands that might leave the impression that the album is a collection of unfinished songs, but most carry a sense of delivery and completion, Locator the one exception, with its slightly unfulfilled fade out.

It's understandable, then, how some reviewers have regarded Schmilco as an interim entry in the Wilco canon (a "minor addition", wrote London's Evening Standard). But even if this 36-minute collection is a relative novella in the overall Wilco library, it's as satisfying, as warm and as complete as any in the ten albums they've released.