As with damn near every Wilco record, I’ve been extremely excited to hear their latest release, the goofily titled Wilco (The Album). Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait until June 30, its scheduled release date. That’s because the record leaked this week to the various torrent sites a full month and a half early. Wilco responded to the leak pretty quickly by allowing fans to stream the record from their site and issuing a statement:

Well we made it nearly a month with copies of Wilco the album floating around out there before it leaked. Pretty impressive restraint in this day and age. But the inevitable happened last night. Since we know you’re curious and probably have better things to do than scour the internet for a download though we do understand the attraction of the illicit we’ve posted a stream of the full album…Feel free to refer to it as wilco the stream if you must.

As the band indicated, it’s pretty much inevitable that a highly anticipated record is going to get leaked. The only question is when. The reason leakage is inevitable is because there are so many potential points of failure in the distribution chain.

If you’re BitTorrent connoisseur, it’s easy enough to find a leaked record almost as soon as it’s available on sites like Demonoid and Waffles.fm. However, these sites have restricted registration and it’s relatively difficult to snag an invite. Instead, many people rely on public trackers, such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova, or a torrent-specific search engine such as Speckly. Although the music industry is always moving to shut down torrent trackers, the fight has proven to be a quixotic mess. After all, it’s easy enough to find illegal torrents using plain old Google. And if you want to know immediately when a record is leaked, just check in with Twitter. 

As it happens, I found out about the leak via the HandsUp Houston message board. It was a review consisting of a single image:

I usually prefer legal avenues for purchasing my downloads (e.g., Emusic, Lala), but in this case, I wasted no time getting my grubby hands on the leaked tracks. And I can happily report there’s no need to hold your nose. Wilco (The Album) continues the band’s transition into less ambitious territory, which they began with Sky Blue Sky. My overall impression is that (The Album) is less musically adventurous than its predecessor but the lyrics and narratives are stronger and more focused. With the exception of the superb Bull Black Nova, Nels Cline’s bad-assery is much less on display and to my ears that’s not such a bad thing. Nor would I call it an improvement. It’s just different.

There’s been an overall mood swing that finds Jeff Tweedy avoiding his darker places and keeping his melodies tight and light. As in a feather. Several songs feel like they could be edited into television theme songs from the 70s or early 80s, including the title track, “Wilco (The Song)”, “Sunny Feeling”, “You Never Know”, and the Feist-y duet “You and I”. Again, that’s not such a bad thing. Wilco have always been accused of being “dad-rock”. On these last two records they’re finally earning that designation. Actually, they sound pretty comfortable being dad rockers. If Wilco have indeed taken the pejorative mantle playfully to heart, they’re still the best dad rock you can buy.

With my own little one due in August, I’ll say it again: That’s not such a bad thing. 

Finally, you might be wondering whether I’ll still buy the record when it comes out. Absolutely. I own every Wilco record on CD, and I’ll pick this one up, too. But Wilco have graciously given illicit downloaders another option:

Judging from the tone of Wilco(The Album), Jeff Tweedy and the boys are feeling some good vibrations. After turning away from the dark introspection of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born with the serene Sky Blue Sky, the new record is straight forward and upbeat. Perhaps seeking a port in the recent economic storm, the denizens of the Internet have joined the party and been buzzing about Wilco (The Album), to the point that .25% of all Twitter users (refusing here to call people "Tweeters") were talking about it at the peak of the buzz. This is nothing new for Wilco, though, who released its last three albums via streams, and has always had a strong online presence. Jeff Tweedy relishes the advance publicity so much in fact, that he understands there will be a portion of fans who download the album illegally. Instead of getting legal (and perhaps knowing most his fanbase will buy a copy anyway), Tweedy says that all downloaders need only make a donation to Inspiration Chicago, one of the band’s favorite charities. Once again, a semi-difficult reformed alt-country progenitor has shown us the way.

Actually, the name of that charity is Inspiration Corporation, which is indeed based in Wilco’s hometown of Chicago.