Formed in Libyan refugee camps in ‘79, the band spent over a decade exiled from its home in Mali. The group didn't put out its first widely released album until 2001, but it's been growing a broad international fanbase through ruthless touring ever since. The band literally encompasses generations of Taureg musicians, all nomadic denizens of the Sahara.

Tassili lacks some of the fire of the band’s earliest work, however: While the 2004 album Amassakoul had a Hendrix-like ferocity, subsequent albums have favored more trance-inducing jams. This time around, the band plays all acoustic instruments, but the formula is familiar. Leader Ibrahim Ag Alhabib sings for a few bars, his 16 or so bandmates respond, and then long, meandering guitar work ensues. Alhabib’s virtuosic fingers still speak volumes, even as he becomes progressively more restrained.

The unamplified percussion and acoustic vibe brings less rock ‘n’ roll and more earthiness to the table. I have no way to verify the label’s claim that the band’s lyrics are now less political, but stripped-down tracks like “Tameyawt” offer the kind of intimacy that would support a more personal approach.

The album features guest spots from Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio, Nels Cline of Wilco, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, which might lead you to believe Tinariwen is reaching for some kind of crossover. The ensemble may be reaching out to other audiences—and its latest single is perhaps its most accessible yet—but you’d be hard-pressed to find any artistic compromises. Cline offers an eerie, effects-drenched atmosphere to the opening track, and the Brass Band melds its instruments organically into “Ya Messinagh.” Adebimpe and Malone make their most prominent appearance on “Tenere Taqhim Tossam,” which meshes a TVOTR-style chorus into the Taureg framework, but they also add subtle harmonies and guitar work elsewhere that’s appropriately hard to notice.

Collaborations aside, the album shouldn’t shock longtime fans. The gradual move toward quieter songs has been a long time coming, and while the band may have opened itself up to a few unexpected visitors, the still-beating heart of the desert blues remains the same.

"Jazz Ruins Everything," read the sticker on bassist Devin Hoff's electric instrument, but if anything the Nels Cline Singers have gotten more jazzy, or at least less noisy, over the past couple of years. That didn't make last night's packed-house show (there may well have been more folks crammed into the Black Cat backstage than there were at the Singers' previous area performance at the cavernous 1,000-seat Paramount Theater in Charlottesville) any less engrossing, as the trio, augmented for a few songs by Yuka Honda on keys, made their happily uncategorizable music come alive. Jazz ruins everything? Not Nels Cline's music.

More photos after the jump.

They'll be at the Black Cat backstage, 1811 14th St. NW at 9 p.m. (with Insect Factory). $15.

In which Steve Kolowich, a Wilco devotee, and Ted Scheinman, a recent convert, discuss last night's show at the Strathmore.

Steve: Ted, you're a concert-going man. NPR has called Wilco "the best live band in America"; I've been talking your ear off about their chops for months; and your girlfriend has been burning CDs like it's her job to prepare you for the transfiguration you were meant to have undergone last night upon seeing the band play live for the first time. So my first question is: Did it live up to the hype?

Ted: First off, excellent reporting. It's true that I've been rotating Kicking Television on my wagon's negligible speakers for ca. six months now—partly out of laziness and mostly because of Nels Cline.

Who, incidentally, is a frightening figure to observe from the photo pit. His pinky finger is longer than my sister's hand.

So, yeah, lots of buildup. But they're definitely monsters in concert. The band covers so much ground—there's this loping thing with Tweedy in the middle, strumming unperturbed while Rome burns around him. From a bang-for-your-buck perspective, I can't bring to mind a band that maxes out the possibilities of live rock in the same way.

Though that acoustic set: dragged on a bit, no?

Steve: That seemed to be the consensus of the audience. You'll recall that at one point during that set, somebody in the crowd yelled "Turn it up!" Jeff Tweedy's response was my own: "I think you're sort of missing the point of this." The point being that after blasting us with "Bull Black Nova" and other noisy numbers, wouldn't it be nice to assemble a tiny living room on the foreground of the stage, let everyone have a seat, and take it easy with a warm, acoustic version of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)"?

The interlude also served as a good foil to what economists call "the diminishing marginal utility of Nels Cline's face-liquefying shreditude." I'm as entranced by the man and his alien digits as much as the next guy. But bear in mind that Wilco played three and a half hours; that's long enough to make anything lose its luster. Watching Cline wield a more delicate weapon for about an hour made it all the more satisfying to watch him rage against second-chair Pat Sansone during "Hoodoo Voodoo" near the end.

You've shredded an ax or two in your day, Ted. Who do you think won that battle? (Subquestion: Do you suppose when Woody Guthrie wrote "Hoodoo Voodoo," he'd have ever imagined it as a platform for a thrashing electric guitar contest?)

Ted: Yeah, the acoustic "Spiders" was definitely a surprise. (And, possibly, yet another instance of Tweedy fucking with us. Remember those Hawaiian windchimes in the coda to "California Stars"? What a cheeky bastard.) As for the chops-fest itself, I know you're siding with Sansone. My ballot goes to Cline, not just because he played more notes, but because during the call and response, he managed to fill each of his two-measure allotments with something more than nicely phrased blues-isms. Sansone was fantastic. But he sounded suspiciously like a Warren Haynes imitator in a roadhouse blues band. Whereas Nels Cline sounded like Nels Cline.

To answer your subquestion: I think Tweedy's cracks about Tea-Partiers would have offset Guthrie's distress at hearing his song so gloriously mangled.

I get what you're saying, pace-wise; if nothing else, the acoustic hour demonstrated that Wilco applies the same measured-dynamics approach to its concerts as it does to its songs. I also think that the median age of the audience (41?) meant that, when your skull wasn't getting rocked, you were getting contact sleepiness from the dude next to you wearing earplugs. (Also: Dude, really? Earplugs during the acoustic set? Are you gonna wear those to Jimmy Buffett in August?)

Steve: The dynamic between the band and the audience was amusing. The Strathmore is a beautiful, wood-paneled concert hall nestled deep in suburbia. And while Tweedy might be getting a little old for those skinny jeans he was filling out, I doubt he's accustomed to crowds that seem to have coordinated a country-club dress code, possibly via phone tree, so he couldn't help but make jokes about how he was worried they'd break the place and poke fun at our poor showing singing gang-lead on "Jesus, etc."

Also, some dude in the bathroom told me Rahm Emmanuel was on hand, entourage in tow. I can't verify that, although that guy in front of us who snapped at me for requesting "Handshake Drugs" may as well have been him. (What, not esoteric enough? Didn't stop you from dancing to it, friend-o.)

Assuming our audience is not as patient as Wilco's, we'd better cut to the closer: Highlight of the show?

Ted: Um, standing so close to Tweedy that I could've tuned his guitar?

I kid. Probably a tie between that final unraveling in "Via Chicago" and the time Tweedy ripped a Neil Young-once-removed solo for two minutes while standing on one leg. Also, it happened quick, but "I Hate It Here" got a great treatment last night.

How about you, old-timer?

Steve: Gah! I was going to say "Via Chicago." That song is Wilco's live show in a nutshell: It's soft, it's loud, it goes wild without ever losing control, and it feels like home.

But since you already said it, I'll go with "I'm The Man That Loves You," with Glenn Kotche leaping into the beat from atop his bass drum.

Thanks for the chat, Ted. Let's do this again—maybe loop in Rahm next time.

Photograph by Ted Scheinman

The critical buzz around Wilco’s latest, self-titled album has centered on the notion of identity. Some have heralded Wilco (the album) as a reclamation of the insouciance of the band’s early albums, while others—particularly City Paper’s own Aaron Leitko—have described it as a tour of the band’s sonic arc over the last decade. But aside the reflexivism of its latest studio release, Wilco at Wolf Trap on Wednesday reiterated what might be the band’s most enduring legacy: its ability to put on one hell of a live show.

Conor Oberst and his new entourage, the Mystic Valley Band, opened to a disappointingly sparse early-evening crowd. Perhaps the Wilco faithful hadn’t gotten the memo on Bright Eyes’s recent identity-tweaking, which has resulted in two wonderful forays into Americana, including a self-titled album of his own. Oberst hasn’t quite mastered the down-home look—he wore skinny jeans rolled to the shins above clunky loafers, along with boxy, unnecessary shades—but his lyrics were rife with roots symbology (religion, boardwalk romances, The Road, etc.), and the warmth of Mystic Valley’s jouncing chord progressions proved an unexpectedly nice vehicle for Oberst’s hoarse, often aharmonic voice. Barnburners such as “NYC–Gone, Gone,” “Moab,” and “I Don’t Wanna Die (in the Hospital)”—which seemed more suited to a sweaty juke joint—were lost on the thin, seated, pre-Wilco audience. Shame.

After entering to the theme from "The Price is Right," Wilco opened with “Wilco (the song),” the opening/title track from the new record. Whether the album is a mission statement or a cliff notes on the band’s evolution, the song exemplifies the band’s introspective turn. The lyrics play like an infomercial: “Do you dabble in depression? / Is someone twisting a knife in your back? /Are you being attacked? / Oh, this is a fact / that you need to know /… Wilco’ll love you, baby.”

There was a lot of love in the building. A group of fans near the stage at one point stood on their seats to reveal lettered tee shirts reading “Wilco (the fans),” prompting frontman Jeff Tweedy to observe, “this parenthetical thing has really gotten out of control.” [Indeed: The venue’s souvenir kiosk featured a host of meta-merchandise, including “Wilco (the tote bag).”] The notoriously prickly Tweedy, his babyface framed by a mess of a graying, scarecrow-like hair, was in jovial spirits as well: He indulged hardcore fans with “the most requested song in the history of our Web site”—a tune called “How to Fight Loneliness,” from 1999’s Summerteeth. To the subsequent applause, Tweedy quipped: “That sounds like 36 people…” He even let The Luckiest Fan in the World—some dude wearing a blue polo in the front row—strum his solo on “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” while he knelt at the edge of the stage and worked the frets.

Guitar solos, particularly those perpetrated by freakout artist Nels Cline, were the order of the night. The set list primarily featured those songs from the Wilco oeuvre that melt from easy-riding singalongs into lengthy, facemelting noise tantrums—notably Sky Blue Sky’s “Impossible Germany,” in which Cline collapsed about like a string-joint doll while Tweedy and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone harmonized on the Allman Brothers-esque backing arpeggios, and A Ghost is Born’s “Handshake Drugs,” in which Cline, Tweedy, and Sansone collaborated on a dissonant shredding sesh while John Stirratt, drummer Glenn Kotche, and synther Mikael Jorgensen held together the basis groove.

These moments of still-catchy chaos were often punctuated by dramatic use of the stage lights, which would backlight the band as silhouettes against a single row of moonlike bulbs, smoldering like a landing spacecraft or a convoy of semi trucks. In one memorable instance, the lights went blinding white, illuminating Wilco in a gods-of-rock tableau centered by Kotche poised atop his drums, head thrown back, arms akimbo. Kotche then threw himself back down into his throne with a cymbal crash and launched the band into a rollicking rendition of “I’m The Man Who Loves You.” Ah, yes: love.

“The last time we played here was nine years ago,” Tweedy said at one point. “We were opening for Natalie Merchant.” Wilco’s stage charisma does well to mask the fact that the band is old enough to step back from itself far enough to make an “identity” album. But while the group’s discography is complex and variegated enough to stimulate bookish theses in critical circles, the experience of seeing Wilco perform live is a purely visceral one.

[To read Leitko’s insightful album review, click here. To see more of Brandon Wu’s photos from the show, click here. For post-show chatter on the Wilco forum Via Chicago, click here. For a sampling Wednesday's easy-grooving/face-meltification, see the embed below (more videos from the concert here).]

For some reason, everybody wants to make a movie about Wilco. The Chicago based band has been the subject of, or at played a significant role in, two full-length documentaries already. And during most of that screen time, the band is grumpy. Remember the scene in The Man In The Sand where singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy insists that Mermaid Avenue, Wilco's collaborative album with Billy Bragg, be re-christened Hard Feelings? Remember watching him roll his eyes while former guitarist Jay Bennett dithered with the mixing board in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart?

But Trixie DVD, the film production company founded by Brendan Canty (formerly of Fugazi) and Christoph Green, has had the good luck to catch the band in a better mood and, as a result, its contributions to the Wilco-film genre–including the Jeff Tweedy solo-tour DVD Sunken Treasure–have been among the finest.

This Saturday Ashes of American Flags, Trixie DVD's recently completed Wilco concert film, will have its DC premiere as part of the DC International Film Festival. Canty and Green were kind enough to speak with Washington City Paper about making the film, the reasons that they love Wilco, and why the band is less grumpy these days.

Interview after the jump:

Washington City Paper: So how did you wind up working with Wilco in the first place?

Brendan Canty: Well, it’s all out of love. Basically we were doing Burn to Shine series and we had made this one film together here [in DC]. It had Bob Mould, Evens, these other bands. My friend Bob Weston, from Shellac, said, “You should come do one in Chicago.” So we booked the whole day and I thought, “I would just love to get Wilco involved,” not only because they’re a big band and that helps everybody, but because they were putting out records like A Ghost is Born.

I had been listening to them for a couple of records, but Ghost really hit me. They were exploring more noise. That’s the interesting thing about the band. They’re a profoundly, like, traditional band, they can tap into old Americana. But that they were also adding this other layer on top of it, this noisy experimental avant stuff that made it really interesting to me.

When we finished that edit [of Burn to Shine: Chicago] I sent them a cut of it and they really liked it. Then we did Jeff Tweedy’s solo acoustic tour DVD, Sunken Treasure, and all the promo films for their last record. This is the first time they gave us the budget to go out and have 9 or 10 people on the road with us for 10 days. It was just a matter of building trust over a period of a few years.

But it all stems from the fact that we were intrigued by the records Jeff started to make. And when Nels Cline joined, that was perfect, just the greatest choice. He used to open for Fugazi in LA, when he was in The Geraldine Fibbers. Now he has this huge new playground of more traditional songs, but he’s more bracketed time, forcing him to be super disciplined.

The players in the band–Glen Kotche, Nells Cline, and Mike and Pat—that’s where this all comes form. That crew is really, to me, the best band n rock and roll right now. If you watch them as musicians…I’m just blown away by how much space they give each other. They really take the time to write songs, to write a setlist, and to play with some degree of purpose, some sense of arc. Anyway, that’s where all this comes from. Now you’ve got me gushing at how much I love their band.

WCP: Wilco had attempted to do a concert film before with filmmaker Sam Jones [director of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart], but the band chose not to release it. Why didn’t it work out? What did you guys decide to do differently?

Canty: You know why that was, it was because Sam was shooting on 35 mm. That requires a lot of lighting. It has to be a lot more staged and the lights get kind of bright. That can be disconcerting people on stage. When Fugazi did Instrument Jem Cohen brought these big lights out to Roseland and it felt really awkward on stage. What we did differently, which worked, is that we used all digital cameras. They’re much more malleable–you can adjust them on the fly to whatever lighting situation you have and be super stealthy. With Sam, it was super lit up and they looked stiff, they were stiff. This one, not so much.

WCP: In the movie the concert footage is broken up travel montages and interview segments, it’s not just a straight concert film. Why did you make that decision?

Green: Basically we just wanted, the idea was that if you shoot a single concert it’s never going to be very involved. We wanted to do something on being an American band. I was very influenced that Sigur Ros film Heima, it kind of shows what it means to be an Icelandic band. We wanted to show what it’s like being an American band and it’s hard to imagine a more Americana band than Wilco.

Canty: The reason why we put that stuff in there is that it’s hard to get people from once side to the other of a 1.5-hour concert movie. We’re not trying to make the Last Waltz, this is more of a road movie. We wanted a film that contextualized every performance environmentally and also geographically. There’s a lot of footage of the different states that they’re driving through. We booked in Cains Ballroom in Tulsa and the Ryman in Nashville–buildings I knew and loved from Fugazi and the band themselves knew and loved. Those served as a nice backdrop. That’s an important aspect of the whole process for me–that it’s not some isolated weird performance. It’s the getting there, the space, and the people. Also, we try to get the best performances and then sequence them in a way that makes people love them all the more.

It also gives you time. In a single concert film, you don’t have the time to sit with the band and get all the other information. That’s one of the most important aspects of this film. The last film about Wilco, it was all fighting, people were fighting all the time. This is sort of the answer to that. Everything is totally cool now, you see people with a lot of love and mutual respect.

WCP: With the interview footage, were there things you were specifically trying to coax them into talking about, or did you just kind of generate conversations on the fly and get some happy accidents?

Green: Well, a little of both. We had themes we were trying to get at, about America. Like, if you’ve been driving across America on how the towns change. But you never know if that’s going to take, if people are going to able to talk about it. I wouldn’t call it a happy accident, but we got the stuff about Nel’s neck fusing and Jeff losing his voice. It gives you a picture of what it’s like being a 40-year old rock star.

WCP: Wilco’s performances are usually more than two-hours long but the movie doesn’t quite stretch out that far.

Canty: I would never make a two-hour-and-a-half-hour documentary about anything. 1.5 hours is super long it’s hard to get somebody to sit through that. We tried to give it some sort of ebb and flow so you’re not sitting there getting hammered constantly, because fatigue is a huge issue with me. I know when I’m sitting there in a theater they get to the other side of that loud bit of “Handshake Drugs” or “Kingpin”, you’re grateful for the three minutes of talking because you can rest and build back up so you can start hearing things again. Because guitars, man, will fucking kill you, as far as I’m concerned. If I put the loudest most rocking Wilco songs in there for an hour-and-a-half I don’t think anybody would sit through it.

WCP: Did you worry about that breaking up the energy of the performance at all?

Canty: You know I really looked at the in between bits as trying to inform the performances. Like, that introduction piece about traditional music going into the Nashville bit–to me that’s really crucial, not so much for what he says just for the fact that he thinks about it. He thinks about his place in relation to Woody Guthrie or whoever. Then, when you actually see him at the Ryman in a cowboy suit playing “Via Chicago”–which is totally a traditional sounding song that totally deconstructs into absolute noise–to me, that’s totally interesting.

WCP: How much did the performances change from night to night?

Canty: Well, the setlist is always different. Also, the reason why we included “Impossible Germany” in the film is because that night they were having a little bit of a hard time. I mean, it was a long ass drive to Mobile, and it was almost a hurricane outside, and everybody was really whooped. But they hit this point during “Impossible Germany” where Nels did that solo and suddenly it felt like the whole mood of the entire set changed and they all woke up really quickly and the whole audience woke up really quickly. After that, it was a fabulous show to the end.

WCP: There’s a point in the movie where members of the band talk about the Walmart-ification of small town America. What made you want to include that?

Canty: The real estate boom has gone bust at this point or, at least, it’s ebbing. But at the time, a year ago, we were still at this point where places were being torn down to build condominiums all over DC and all over the nation. To me, that’s a threat to the things that I care about in this world. And if you’re out on a bus driving around the country six-months out of the year it’s the kind of thing that will drive you crazy. If you pull into a town and it’s the same as the last town and over and over and over again, then that’s a problem. Everybody has commented on it, it seems a little trite to even mention it. That is the view from the window of this band. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the view from the window of my house. I see these changes all the time across DC. I don’t want to be an old curmudgeon, but we are losing a lot of what made our cities great. From having driven across this country dozens of times it’s not symptomatic it’s actually the problem. I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about it. Maybe as capitalism fails us, we’ll have a chance of reviving the small town mentality that we used to have.

1. St. Vincent at Rock & Roll Hotel, February 26
2. Nels Cline Singers at the Paramount Theater, June 6
3. Tim Berne’s Bloodcount at An Die Musik, February 9
4. Amanda Palmer at the 9:30 Club, November 18
5. Wilco at Lyric Opera House, December 14
6. Salome at DC9, August 10
7. Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin at Blues Alley, March 3
8. Earth at Rock & Roll Hotel, May 4
9. Nobu Stowe at George Washington University, September 7
10. Evangelista at Velvet Lounge, April 16
11. Boris at the Black Cat, July 8
12. Škampa Quartet & Iva Bittová at the Library of Congress, April 11
13. Dälek at Rock & Roll Hotel, February 27
14. Kamelot at Jaxx, October 16
15. Woven Hand at Iota, October 17