Wilco find a bit of that old spark on The Whole Love

Wilco today, and, yes, that's a Saturday Night Live shot.

It's been a long time since Wilco turned the musical world on its head with one of the best rock albums of the last 10 years. 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was an amazing work for a number of reasons. It was the perfect sound for the time. It overturned expectations for a band that had cut its teeth on alt-country and breezy pop, thanks to Jim O'Rourke, whose remix of the material evidently led to a complete remake of the band at the expense of songwriting multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett. And the band's sound was deemed so revolutionary that its label, Reprise Records, refused to release it. It was all the stuff of a perfect rock legend.

Flash forward to 2011 and Wilco's reputation has not held up so well. Perhaps YHF was so good it was impossible to top. After Bennett's departure, Jeff Tweedy -- the founder, singer and principal songwriter of the band -- assembled a veteran gang of musicians with serious chops and and polish: Nels Cline, Pat Sansone and Glenn Kotche. Yet, with each successive release -- from A Ghost is Born to Sky Blue Sky and Wilco the Album -- the band seemed to lose more and more of its direction, nestling into a pseudo mush of contentedly middle-aged noodle-happy classic rock. There were moments on Wilco the Album in which Tweedy sounded decidedly like Don Henley, the band as limp as an Eagles reunion tour.

So I was surprised to find myself enjoying the band's new album, The Whole Love, which just came out two weeks ago. It's the first Wilco record that's had me humming melodies in a good long while. They've left the proggy guitar workouts of Sky Blue Sky and the limp "dad rock" of Wilco the Album mostly behind. Instead of tired and uninspired, Tweedy and company sound again, finally, like they believe in their material.

The Whole Love starts off very well. "The Art of Almost" throbs into being in a swirl of electronic and string noises over a slick drum beat (that almost recalls something Radiohead might have done) until it breaks in Tweedy's familiar, world-weary voice. It's the most impressive sound the band has managed since A Ghost is Born.

From there there is much about the album that recalls Wilco at its best. "I Might" and "Dawned on Me" are decidedly Summerteeth, a blend of fuzz bass and acoustic guitar rock that is very very much Wilco. "Born Alone" follows later in the same vein... It might have been a track from YHF before O'Rourke got his hands on it.

Holdouts from that sound, perhaps the one place where the album might feel a little lax by some listeners' standards, are the slower songs -- a few country-drenched weepers, particularly "Open Mind." There are songs that recall "Sky Blue Sky" from the same album and even some of Wilco's earliest work, when  Tweedy was just beginning to reinvent himself after Uncle Tupelo, the influential alt-country act in which he played guitar, bass and sang, broke up. They don't push the band's sonic palette at all.

These songs, though, despite their simplicity, are good songs. To me they are a reminder that the consistent thing that makes Wilco good is Tweedy. At the heart of the band is Tweedy's heart-on-his-sleeve songwriting and his voice -- that weary, whiny yowl, so rough yet so perfect -- that really gives Wilco its defining sound. Everything else the band does is secondary. Whether it's Beatles-esque pop, deconstructed post-modern rock or slide-guitar drenched ballads, Wilco's success depends on Tweedy's performance as a singer and songwriter.

And it's here were I think The Whole Love is more successful than the last two records Wilco has made. Tweedy and company sound like a coherent unit, and a unit that has found the way to put the songs before individual guitar parts or drum beats. The songs are just better.

It's nice, really, to know that that Tweedy still has it in him. Perhaps not enough inspiration to replicate YHF, but enough to make a record of really good songs.