Hollow Honeycomb

Wilco “Ten Dead”

There is perhaps no musician better equiped to articulate the particular mix of sorrow, frustration, and fatigue of learning about yet another mass shooting than Jeff Tweedy, a guy who always sings in a warm but weary tone. “Ten Dead” sounds like late period Beatles on two hours of sleep, with Tweedy singing in a shellshocked near-monotone in the verses as he relays what he’s heard on the radio: “Ten dead, ten dead, now there are ten dead.” You get no context, you get no sense of what’s going on. All you get here is an empty feeling in the gut that you try to fill with the disgust and sadness you know should be there but is hard to access through the numbness of repetition and the abstraction of the situation.

Buy it from Bandcamp.