Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Start with great folk songs then try your best to ruin them by adding…
-a bunch of weird drones
-Tempo which drifts all over the place
-Lyrics bordering on non-sensical
-Vocals which consistently sound strained and miss every note
-Synths which clip the mixing desk
-Guitar solos in a different key to everything else
-Drums which sound like a jazz drummer from a completely different band who just happened to be recording next door
-Piano thuds about twice the volume any sane producer would mix them
-shortwave radio samples

The result is an even better album than you started with. A standout in the era of quantised snap-to-grid, compressed to hell “professional” recordings. The kind of thing AI would never create.

And I bloody love it.

A guitar, three chords and a rhyming dictionary.

Recorded in a time of band tension, this is Country Punk with experimental overtones.

Not my favourite, but not the worst I've heard either.

Raw and weird collection of country adjacent rock songs that sometimes gets a little too weird but almost always makes up for it

Jesus etc is a damn near perfect song

4

I didn't love it. It was fine, but yanno, just kind of on in the background.

I’d actually been hoping a bit that the album would disprove my preconceptions about ‘indie rock’, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Admittedly, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” has even been labelled “art rock”, which I can sort of understand given the experimental sounds here and there, but essentially Jeff Tweedy and his band remain true to the cliché of music without catchy hooks, featuring lots of self-centred lyrics and poor vocals. To be fair, I’ve heard worse, but over the course of a whole album, it does end up boring me. Critics regard the album as “one of the most experimental”, but if that’s the case, I’d rather not be listening to “the least experimental” tracks. The standards for indie rock are clearly not very high. For me, despite a few quite decent tracks, it’s just not enough.

4.5/5. In 2024 I took a trip to Chicago with two close friends of mine. We did a ton of the typical touristy stuff like the Bean, getting deep dish, going to the top of a skyscraper, etc.. but when we were on an architecture boat tour along the Chicago River I saw the Marina City towers and thought to myself “woah, the Wilco Towers!” I immediately snapped a photo and edited it to look as close to the cover of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as I could. Due to that moment I ended up listening to the album for the first time in forever on my flight back home and fell in love with the album again.

The opener “I am trying to break your heart” has this great sense of unease to it with these random drum hits going off along with a strange groove forming from the bass and piano parts. Then you get “Kamera” next which is a much more structurally normal song, but it’s also a banger. I also love “Radio Cure” which feels very loose in its verses but suddenly gains structure in its chorus, leading to a really nice back and forth. And the strong track list goes on and on with great songs like “Jesus etc” “heavy metal drummer” or “war on war.” If you’re looking for some good 2000’s indie, you really can’t go wrong with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was my second album by Wilco. I really enjoyed Being There, so I went into this expecting big things and it definitely delivered.

This is a fantastic album. I had it playing over and over throughout the evening, and it got better with every listen. It’s proof that American bands can make brilliant indie music, blending thoughtful songwriting with experimental and ambient sounds in a way that feels natural rather than forced. The album manages to sound both warm and distant at the same time, which gives it a really unique atmosphere.

I’ll definitely be coming back to this one again.

Favourite tracks: Reservations is a lovely track, and I really enjoyed I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. Honestly, every song on the album brings something worthwhile.
Least favourite tracks: Every song deserves its place on the album.
Album artwork: A really cool and memorable cover, even if I’m still not entirely sure what I’m looking at.

Over unieke platen gesproken. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, het album wat het label niet wilde uitbrengen omdat het niet 'commercieel levensvatbaar' was. Gedetailleerd en bright (ik kan geen Nederlands woord vinden wat passend genoeg is), de perfecte balans tussen Americana en experimentele soundscapes.

Lovely. Might need a few more listens for me to get the full benefit

Supongo que no todos los álbumes te pueden gustar. Realmente quise que me gustara, pero honestamente no hubo nada que me encantara. Probablemente si lo escucho en un futuro quizás me guste más. Le doy 3 porque como álbum completo sí me gustó, pero no pude rescatar nada particularmente.

My brother is a huge fan of Wilco and this album in general. It's an album that has some real high spots but some parts of it are kind of bland by comparison. Not bad just not as memorable as the peaks.

Oh yeah I'm vibing 😎

Yesterday, Kacey Musgraves taught me that country-inspired singer-songwriter music can be good. Today, Wilco is teaching me just how bad alternative rock can be. The ingredients are the same as yesterday, just with the signs reversed: a singer with a boring voice who sings in an annoying way, “songs” you forget immediately after the last note, and a production that prioritizes effects (which are also poorly used) over a decent overall sound. Someone wrote that this album is just incredibly boring—but it’s worse than that: I’ve been listening to these guys for 50 minutes now, and all I can remember are random “sound effects.”
You could call it art rock, I call it noise ****

The production is so impressive here but some of the songs were missing a bit of something that was needed - maybe with time these will click but for now I'm going 3*

okay really big fan of whatever the hell is going on in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.

IT'S LIKE IF COLDPLAY WAS LISTENABLE! I dig it! (aka guy with slightly whiny voice in an alt rock band). Heavy Metal Drummer is really cute :))))

Mostly neutral with a few notable exceptions. Better than Coldplay!

Is Wilco and this album way over hyped and over rated? Totally. Is my job to under rate this album as some sort of correction? Not at all. I'd give it 7/10, but I'll round up to 4/5.

Jamais écouté avant.

Un album qui parvient à paraître bordélique tout en restant cohérent. Une prouesse de songwriting sous influence bruitiste, presque psychédélique. Très fort.

Top : Jesus, Etc.
Flop : Reservations

Really not sure where I fall with this album. It has a couple of good tracks (I’m The Man Who Loves You, Heavy Metal Drummer) and the rest just leaves me a bit cold. It’s not actually bad, but fact is,I’m struggling several hours later to recall much about any of them. Seems Wilco committed the ultimate sin of just being a bit dull with this collection of songs, and I can’t really figure out why it is so critically revered. 3 stars which is a middle of the road score for a middle of the road album

I got really bored. I can't believe this is from 2003. I get that there are bands that are trying to sound vintage, but why do they need to be included here if there is virtually NOTHING different from older bands that are on this list. Really, I am ok with new music that sounds vintage if it has at least something that anchors it to the modern age. This ain't it for me.

Great, more depressing 2000's indie. This sounds like the cure for insomnia. Would it kill them to add some dynamics, or maybe a tempo change? Doldrums defined.