Twilight Override is constructed to be immersive quite than visceral. We’re alongside for the journey, however cautious of the thrills. Gasoline, grass or ass. A number of cries, a lot of laughs. The vogue for Freudian remedy—the as soon as per week, lay on the sofa, dig into your childhood stuff—has lengthy since fallen out of favor with the broader psychoanalytic group, changed by usually quicker, cheaper, extra efficacious approaches like CBT. Primarily based on the proof offered by Twilight Override, nobody has knowledgeable Jeff Tweedy. On the contrary, we’re in for the lengthy model—he has felt clean, he has eaten marriage ceremony cake, he has seen the expansive Western sky at nightfall—the world is an excessive amount of with him, late and shortly. However there’s a lot splendor too. On the swelling, string-driven “Stray Cats in Spain,” he sees stray cats in Spain, or probably, rockabilly revivalists the Stray Cats. In both case, it’s an epiphany bordering on a non secular expertise: “Oh what an attractive day,” Tweedy sings, summoning the quivering awe of his “Ashes of American Flags” tenor. He’s more and more attuned to the static-y emotional frequencies of Robert Hunter, the place the overlap between bone-deep fatigue, determined craving, and the opportunity of ecstatic deliverance bind collectively in a gloriously wobbly existential dance. Like Hunter, he perceives the chic within the prosaic. When Tweedy sings: “Stray cats in 2019, rocking on the street,” his question-mark vocals recommend one who can’t fairly imagine he’s witnessed one thing so transportingly magnificent.
He received’t be your mirror, however he’ll present you the place to look. Twilight Override is continuously humorous, as on the jaunty “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter,” the place he sings traces like “I would like you to blow smoke in my eyes” with Lou-worthy lasciviousness, a worthy replace to Jonathan Richman’s positively good tribute. “KC Rain (No Surprise)” sounds just a little like Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman subjected to shock remedy. The beguilingly bizarre chamber-pop of “Love Is for Love” evokes the 1970 traditional Classic Violence, as if John Cale had been his babysitter too. On the Sister/Lovers-like “Too Actual,” Tweedy lays naked his deepest anxieties behind a tremulous wall of delay harking back to the sensible 4-track recordings of F.M. Cornog’s East River Pipe and Jack Logan’s Bulk. Thus born, the ghosts are in all places. Infamously, cruelly, Dylan as soon as informed Phil Ochs: “You’re not a people singer, you’re a journalist.” Or was it so merciless? Tweedy is a journalist of the soul, all the time looking down these sad-ashtray leads.
