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With Star Wars, Wilco’s new surprise album, the Chicago sextet fuses its earlier noise-rock inclinations with its latter-day penchant for sturdy songcraft. The key, once again, is guitarist Nels Cline, who has never sounded more at home since joining the group in 2004. Cline’s unrivaled playing is the first sound on the opening instrumental “EKG,” and it remains the album’s defining common thread throughout, from the taut power-pop of “Random Name Generator,” to the ’90s feedback grunge of “Pickled Ginger,” to the droning album highlight “You Satellite.” On that last one, which Cline and drummer Glenn Kotche co-wrote with Tweedy, the band slowly builds around Cline’s hypnotic riff until Tweedy shouts, “I don’t want to go and I don’t want to stay,” outright refuting Mick Jones’ age-old question, and the song bubbles over. 

Wilco has always indulged its maximalist tendencies to great success, but one of the greatest joys of this latest effort is hearing the band practicing its newest trick: concision. At 34 minutes, Star Wars is their shortest studio record by some measure, with only one song going over four minutes. Much of Wilco’s newfound brevity can be chalked up to Tweedy, whose songwriting seems particularly reinvigorated after last year’s solo detour. His writing on Star Wars still walks the line between his trademark blend of jaded romanticism and associative abstraction, but he exhibits an unprecedented economy of language and phrase this time around. “Try the words in sequence,” he teases, self-consciously, on “Taste the Ceiling,” “but that’s never how it’s done.” – Spin