Las Vegas Weekly

Wilco returns on the wings of a guitar

June 19, The Joint

Wilco performs live at The Joint in the Hard Rock Hotel.

Photo: Erik Kabik/Retna/www.erikkabikphoto.com

With a wink and a smile, Jeff Tweedy waged war on the video screens flanking his band Friday night, hinting at—and succeeding in—their blackout without ever really asking. On a good night Tweedy’s unassuming Chicago-based six-piece can wield similarly sly power, as Wilco did throughout its first Vegas headlining performance in seven years. A well-designed, 26-song setlist contributed, touching on every studio album and mixing sure-fire low-to-high favorites (“At Least That’s What You Said,” “Misunderstood”) with lesser-performed material (“Box Full of Letters,” “A Magazine Called Sunset”) voted on by fans through the website.

But mostly, the story of Wilco’s return to town was guitarist Nels Cline, the 53-year-old Southern Californian added to the lineup after the group’s previous Vegas visit, a 2003 opening gig for R.E.M. at the Thomas & Mack Center.

Cline, whose résumé is loaded with experimental, punk and free-jazz projects, infused Wilco’s rootsy sound—yes, even the mellow stuff comprising June 30 release Wilco (The Album) and its soft-as-Bread predecessor, 2007’s Sky Blue Sky—with the essential element of unpredictability. Cline got noisy early, contorting his guitar and body (think Thurston Moore) to ensure oldie “A Shot in the Arm” sounded little like its LP incarnation. Later, he twisted a sweetly melodic lead around restrained guitar work from Tweedy and Pat Sansone during “Impossible Germany.” And then Cline let loose one last time, for an enjoyably messy 13-minute rendition of “Spiders (Kidsmoke).”

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Though his voice broke now and again, Tweedy was in solid form, asking the Joint crowd of around 2,000 to vote for its video preference, after the screens had already darkened; “off” won easily, prompting the Wilco frontman to remark, “I don’t know how to take that … Scary when we’re bigger, aren’t we?”

After all that memorable main-set action, a marathon nine-song encore felt somewhat superfluous—most folks seemed to have lost the will to move by the time the apropos “Casino Queen” sent them streaming back toward the Hard Rock¬’s circular hub.