Amazon.com's Best of 2000
Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II finds Billy Bragg & Wilco setting Woody Guthrie's words to their own music a second time. The result is more sonically diverse than the
first installment, but just as rewarding. With guests Natalie Merchant and bluesman Corey Harris lending their voices to this new-century hootenanny, this 15-song disc manages to capture the collective spirit of both IWW and the WTO times. Woody would've been proud of the initial collection; he'd be prouder still of this one.
--Steven Stolder
From Amazon.co.uk
Who knew that after the undeniable, sometimes shimmering, sometimes rustic magic of
Mermaid Avenue that there was enough quality material for a second volume? By setting their own music to
Woody Guthrie's lyrics,
Billy Bragg and
Wilco once again offer a 50-minute testament to Guthrie's long, dynamic shadow. This sophomore meeting is as balanced between the up-tempo and the down-tempo as was the first volume. Jeff Tweedy's rasp gives all the Wilco-driven tunes a certain grit, and the songs Bragg takes on have a luminescent, frank earnestness that intensifies the delivery of Guthrie's lyrical social critiques. "Hot Rod Hotel", with Bragg handling the vocals, melds the two approaches best, and "Secret of the Sea" is the album's most pop-like centrepiece.
Natalie Merchant's playful "I Was Born" is brief but sweet, just as blues-man Corey Harris's "Against the Law" is an uplift, with his passionate vocal wail mirroring the political gist of Guthrie's words. The moody closers, "Black Wind Blowing" and "Someday, Some Morning, Sometime" end
Mermaid Avenue Volume 2 with a pair of sweetly sad gems, one a Bragg-sung folk blues that mourns the loss of cotton crops in the American dustbowl era, the other a Tweedy-sung paean to lost love.
--Andrew Bartlett
![Wilco (The Album) [12 inch Analog]](http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/I/61TR%2BVkjLOL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
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