Certain Songs #3328: Wilco – “Secret of The Sea”

Certain Songs #3327: Wilco – “Airline to Heaven”

Certain Songs #3325: Wilco – “Via Chicago”

Sweating the Plague

Let me say right off that Guided By Voices' final 2019 effort does not contain, beyond its title anyway, any prophetic worth a la Wilco’s written-before-9/11 tall building shake / voices escape / singing sad sad songs.

A whirlpool of illness and sweaty suffering was indeed just around the corner when Sweating the Plague emerged, but our hero dedicated the record to out of control street parties, the end of his wrestling career and unique crickets - that's right, unique crickets - not COVID.

Even the record's final, somewhat thrilling, track, Son of the Beard, fails in the portent game. Don't listen to this if you want to know what will go down in Ted Lasso's Season 4. But get into the song if you, like Bob, wonder who is gonna throw their trousers down when Pollard can't hide.

You've got a pretty good sample here of the entire record. It's totally good, certainly on par with whatever yesterday's record was called and way better than the one before that. Pollard even lets one of his guitar goons sing the unique cricket tune in question; perhaps he simply forgot to record any vocals before high-stepping it back to the hippo sanctuary he surely runs in Dayton, Ohio.

Acoustic guitars factor into a lot of the songs, the lead guitar tones are muscular and delightfully all over the map and the whole thing rocked my morning run from angst into joy. What the hell else could one ask for?

Here's another tasty track; I guarantee it will not give you the plague.