'Sky' brings Wilco down to Earth

There's some irony in the fact that, five years after Reprise Records execs famously deemed Wilco's masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot too weird to be commercially viable (causing the band to buy back their master tapes and leave the label), the now-commercially-successful band has released an album as aggressively normal-sounding as Sky Blue Sky. Indeed, it could serve as a test among Wilco fans: do you prefer the smooth, warm, soft-rock Wilco, or do you need beeps, radio samples and dissonance? \nWhile the quirky elements of Yankee and 2004's A Ghost Is Born were never what drew me to Wilco, Sky is a bit too inoffensively "adult-alternative" for its own good. It certainly makes for a pleasant listen, but it lacks anything close to the spine-tingling pop of Yankee. And it offers neither the lows nor quite the highs of Ghost -- you'll be less likely to skip tracks with Sky, but the album also proves less memorable.\nStill, there's plenty of good stuff to be found here. "Either Way" starts things off somewhat snoozily, but second track "You Are My Face" kicks in enough guitar distortion and lyrical discontent to snap the listener back to attention. "Impossible Germany" achieves a cool groove akin to Ghost's "Handshake Drugs," while "Side With The Seeds" whips the listener from a piano-and-drums driven slow-dance into swirling guitar solos. "Shake It Off" builds up from spare percussion and a repeated guitar arpeggio into a dirty bass-heavy stomp, and "Please Be Patient With Me" is a lovely rainy-day acoustic ballad.\nWhere Sky gets less interesting is on tracks like "Hate It Here" -- a blue-eyed soul song in the "baby I miss you, please come home" vein that, while an original, sounds like it could be a cover of anybody from Rod Stewart to Vince Gill. Likewise on the countrified title-track "Sky Blue Sky" or the gospel-inflected "What Light." It's all perfectly listenable, but for a band that made its name by sounding like no one else, much of Sky sounds like it could be anyone else.