Ever since Jeff Tweedy abandoned the comfortable confines of insurgent/alt.country with his old band, Uncle Tupelo, for a few greener pastures, you could sense his underlying desire for "Wilco" to become something other than a No Depression standard bearer. Especially when his contemporaries like Buffalo Tom and Grant Lee Buffalo also felt a need to move into different vistas of pop.

But, instead of raiding the treasures of roots rock for a quick fix, "Wilco" aimed their sights higher at becoming one of "America's Great Bands." The eclecticism shown during "Being There" proved they had mastered the writing and performing components, while their collaboration with Billy Bragg (on the adventurous "Mermaid Avenue," where several of Woody Guthrie's unpublished poems were set to contemporary music) showed that their chops were firing on all cylinders.

Who would have figured, that "Wilco" would issue one of the most (if not the last) important American albums of the '90s by sounding so British. Slotting somewhere between The Kinks' "Muswell Hillbillies" and John Lennon's "Imagine," "Wilco" have crafted one of the most engaging, interpersonal musical statements in a period when indifference and listlessness have mangled most of the chart toppers.

With a melding of Ray Davies' journalistic intensity and Lennon's sloppy sensitivity, Tweedy and bandmates have produced a disc that smirks about lost love, wells up in tears over simple friendships, resigns itself to fatalism, and then rocks in the aisles.

What "Wilco" seem to have conquered, in no small way, are the tiny passions that drive us, like "There's a whisper I'd like to breathe into your ear/ But I'm too scared to get that close to you right now," or "Every little thing that you do/ Seems so much better than I could do/ Oh, I should've been listening to you/ To every word you said." Likewise, the music taps into all kinds of rockish and poppish resources with an edge and attention to subtleties, like a mellotron borrowed from "A Fool On The Hill" for "She's A Jar," or the weary voice of "I'm So Tired" returning in "We're Just Friends." In fact, there's not a bit of the ol' hillside twang until the guitar strokes of track ten's "ELT" chime by, but you'll probably not care by then. It's that impressive.