Wilco announce their new album, Cousin, available worldwide September 29th on dBpm Records, and present its lead single, “Evicted.” Cousin will be available on vinyl, CD and digitally, and is available for pre-order now. This will be the first release under dBpm Records’ new distribution arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment. The band will tour Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Mexico and the United States surrounding the album’s release (tickets on sale here).
“I’m cousin to the world,” frontman Jeff Tweedy confesses. “I don’t feel like I’m a blood relation, but maybe I’m a cousin by marriage.” Produced by the singular Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, Cousin marks the first time Wilco have handed the reins over to a producer outside their immediate circle of collaborators since Sky Blue Sky. Le Bon’s influences — among them the inclusion of saxophone, cheap Japanese guitars, and a cinematic, New Wave-style drum machine — drive the album into the future. The result is Wilco’s most pointed and evocative album, one related but not tied to our present moment, truly new ground for a band that has tested musical boundaries throughout its lengthy career.
Longtime admirers of each other’s work, Wilco and Le Bon first met at the band’s Solid Sound Festival in 2019, where they formed an immediate connection, inspiring Tweedy to invite Le Bon to the band’s famed Chicago studio, The Loft, in 2022 to work on Cousin. Le Bon pushed the band to take risks, repurposing Wilco’s established strengths and challenging them to oppose habits — all the while maintaining what has, for the last thirty years, defined Wilco as a band, their fearlessness, made possible by musical virtuosity and the secret language only a family shares. “The amazing thing about Wilco is they can be anything,” Le Bon says. “They're so mercurial, and there’s this thread of authenticity that flows through everything they do, whatever the genre, whatever the feel of the record. There aren’t many bands who are able to, this deep into a successful career, successfully change things up.”
Wilco - Evicted (Official Lyric Video)
Le Bon arrived in Chicago to rebuild: to create a scaffold with Glenn Kotche’s architectural drumming and John Stirratt’s contrapuntal bass lines; a scene with Mikael Jorgensen’s cold, lonesome synths, Pat Sansone’s plaintive piano work, and guest instrumentalist Euan Hinshelwood’s mangled saxophones; and a topographic pattern out of Tweedy’s electric guitar bends and Nels Cline’s textural explosions, which Le Bon describes as “the weather,” to carve a path for Tweedy’s yearning lyrics.
“Cate is very suspicious of sentiment,” Tweedy says, “but she’s not suspicious of human connection.” With Le Bon’s direction, Cousin evolved into something icier and more nighttime-ish than anything Wilco have created before, while retaining the earnest quality of Tweedy’s lyrics and voice. Tweedy delivers his feelings, now, from an environment that reflects the one we live in and the one inspiring the songs in the first place. The album’s statement on human connection is writ small, revealed in vignettes of the lowest social unit: a pair. “Evicted,” the album’s first single, sees a narrator grappling with his responsibility for losing love counterpointed by Marc Bolan-inspired guitars. “I guess I was trying to write from the point of view of someone struggling to make an argument for themself in the face of overwhelming evidence that they deserve to be locked out of someone’s heart,” comments Tweedy. “Self-inflicted wounds still hurt and in my experience they’re almost impossible to fully recover from.”
Cousin Tracklist:
1. Infinite Surprise
2. Ten Dead
3. Levee
4. Evicted
5. Sunlight Ends
6. A Bowl And A Pudding
7. Cousin
8. Pittsburgh
9. Soldier Child
10. Meant To Be
Photo by Peter Crosby
Boss’ firstWaza Tube Amp Expander, built with an integrated power amp that enables boosted signal as well as attenuated sounds, was and remains the OX’s main competition. Both products have copious merits but, at $1,299 (Boss) and $1,499 (Universal Audio), each is expensive. And while both units are relatively compact, they aren’t gear most folks casually toss in a backpack on the way out the door. The new Waza Tube Expander Core, however, just might be. And though it sacrifices some refinements for smaller size, its much-more accessible price and strong, streamlined fundamental capabilities make it a load-box alternative that could sway skeptics.
Micro Manager
The TAE Core is around 7 1/2" wide, just over 7 " long, and fewer than 4 " tall, including the rubber feet. That’s about half the width of an original TAE or OX. The practical upside of this size reduction is obvious and will probably compel a lot of players to use the unit in situations in which they’d leave a full-size TAE at home. The streamlined design is another source of comfort. With just five knobs on its face, the TAE Core has fewer controls and is easier to use than many stompboxes. In fact, the most complicated part of integrating the TAE Core to your rig might be downloading the necessary drivers and related apps.
Connectivity is straightforward, though there are some limitations. You can use TAE Core wirelessly with an iOS or Windows tablet or smartphone, as long as you have the BT-DUAL adaptor (which is not included and sets you back around 40 bucks). However, while desktop computers recognize the TAE Core as a Bluetooth-enabled device, you cannot use the unit wirelessly with those machines. Instead, you have to connect the TAE Core via USB. In a perfectly ordered world, that’s not a big problem. But if you use the TAE Core in a small studio—where one less cable is one less headache—or you prefer to interface with the TAE Core app on a desktop where you can toggle fast and easily between large, multi-track sessions and the app, the inability to work wirelessly on a desktop can be a distraction. The upside is that the TAE Core app itself is, functionally and visually, almost identical in mobile and desktop versions, enabling you to select and drag and drop virtual microphones into position, add delay, reverb, compression, and EQ effects, choose various cabinets with different speaker configurations and sizes, and introduce new rigs and impulse responses to a tone recipe in a flash. And though the TAE Core app lacks some of the photorealistic panache and configuration options in the OX app, the TAE Core’s app is just as intuitive.Less Is More
One nice thing about the TAE Core’s more approachable $699 price is that you don’t have to feel too bad on nights that you “underutilize” the unit and employ it as an attenuator alone. In this role, the TAE Core excels. Even significantly attenuated sounds retain the color and essence of the source tone. Like any attenuator-type device, you will sacrifice touch sensitivity and dynamics at a certain volume level, yielding a sense of disconnection between fingers, gut, guitar, and amp. But if you’re tracking “big” sounds in a small space, you can generate massive-sounding ones without interfacing with an amp modeler and flat-response monitors, which is a joy in my book. And again, there’s the TAE Core’s ability to “expand” as well as attenuate, which means you can use the TAE Core’s 30-watt onboard power amp to amplify the signal from, say, a 5-watt Fender Champion 600 with a 6" speaker, route it to a 2x12, 4x12, or virtual equivalent in the app, and leave your bandmate with the Twin Reverb and bad attitude utterly perplexed.
The Verdict
Opting for the simpler, thriftier TAE Core requires a few sacrifices. Power users that grew accustomed to the original TAE’s super-tunable “resonance-Z” and “presence-Z” controls, which aped signal-chain impedance relationships with sharp precision, will have to make do with the simpler but still very effective stack and combo options and the “air feel level” spatial ambience control.The DC power jack is less robust. It features only MIDI-in rather than MIDI-in/-through/-out jacks, and, significantly, 70 watts less power in the onboard power amp. But from my perspective, the Core is no less “professional” in terms of what it can achieve on a stage or in a studio of any size. Its more modest feature set and dimensions are, in my estimation, utility enhancements as much as limitations. If greater power and MIDI connectivity are essentials, then the extra 600 bones for the original TAE will be worth the price. For many of us, though, the mix of value, operational efficiencies, and the less-encumbered path to sound creation built into the TAE Core will represent a welcome sweet spot that makes dabbling in this very useful technology an appealing, practical proposition.
Guitarist Dave Harrington concedes that while there are a few mile markers in the music that he and musician Nicolas Jaar create as Darkside, improvisation has been the rule from day one. The experimental electronic trio’s latest record, Nothing, which released in February on Matador, was the first to feature new percussionist Tlacael Esparza.
Taking the record on tour this year, Darkside stopped in at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl, where Harrington broke down his complex signal chains for PG’s Chris Kies.
Brought to you by D’Addario.
Express Yourself
Harrington bought this mid-2000s Gibson SG at 30th Street Guitars in New York, a shop he used to visit as a kid. The headstock had already been broken and repaired, and Harrington switched the neck pickup to a Seymour Duncan model used by Derek Trucks. Harrington runs it with D’Addario NYXL .010s, which he prefers for their stretch and stability.
The standout feature is a round knob installed by his tech behind the bridge, which operates like an expression pedal for the Line 6 DL4. Harrington has extras on hand in case one breaks.
Triple Threat
Harrington’s backline setup in Nashville included two Fender Twin Reverbs and one Fender Hot Rod DeVille. He likes the reissue Fender amps for their reliability and clean headroom. Each amp handles an individual signal, including loops that Harrington creates and plays over; with each amp handling just one signal rather than one handling all loops and live playing, there’s less loss of definition and competition for frequency space.
Dave Harrington’s Pedalboards
Harrington says he never gives up on a pedal, which could explain why he’s got so many. You’re going to have to tune in to the full Rundown to get the proper scoop on how Harrington conducts his three-section orchestra of stomps, but at his feet, he runs a board with a Chase Bliss Habit, Mu-Tron Micro-Tron IV, Eventide PitchFactor, Eventide H90, Hologram Microcosm, Hologram Chroma Console, Walrus Monument, Chase Bliss Thermae, Chase Bliss Brothers AM, JHS NOTAKLÖN, two HexeFX reVOLVERs, and an Amped Innovations JJJ Special Harmonics Extender. A Strymon Ojai provides power.
At hip-level sits a board with a ZVEX Mastotron, Electro-Harmonix Cathedral, EHX Pitch Fork, Xotic EP Booster, two EHX 45000 multi-track looping recorders, Walrus Slöer, Expedition Electronics 60 Second Deluxe, and another Hologram Microcosm. A Live Wire Solutions ABY Box and MXR DC Brick are among the utility tools on deck.
Under that board rest Harrington’s beloved Line 6 DL4—his desert-island, must-have pedal—along with a controller for the EHX 45000, Boss FV-50H volume pedal, Dunlop expression pedal, Boss RT-20, a Radial ProD2, and another MXR DC Brick.
