I didn’t think Wilco had this in them. Sky Blue Sky and Wilco: The Album were respected for their finely honed songs, but neither shone with a driven desperation to be exceptional. The Whole Love is different. The spectacular dynamics of seven-minute opener, The Art of Almost, full of stinging guitars that scream to a crescendo while colliding with disembodied electronics over a pulsing motorik beat, immediately announce that Jeff Tweedy and co. have the toys out, and they’re playing. But, it’s not all Americana art-rock. Tweedy has his confession book out on Dawned On Me, singing “I’ve been hurt and consoled…heart of cold/so I’m told/…I’ve been taken by the sound/of my own voice.” The record is tinged by a sense of emergence from a fog; it’s their first album since the death of ex-member Jay Bennett, and first for their own label. Crucially, their instinctual sense of light and shade is intact. Black Moon is all pedal steel for penning letters on dark nights, Born Alone boasts a distorted Beatlesque guitar then ambushes us with a symphonically sweeping fade. The remarkable One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend) provides 2011’s loveliest acoustic guitar refrain. Wilco are back, with a license to kill. No corner of their oeuvre is left unshaken or unexplored on their finest since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. By Jonathan Alley.

Epitaph/Warner.