Getting a reputation is easy. What's harder is living up to one -- or living it down.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the daring and uncompromising fourth album from Chicago alt-country icons Wilco, already has a reputation as a troublemaker -- and it hasn't been released yet. In fact, this album was causing grief before it was finished. First, guitarist Jay Bennett quit during recording. Then, when the group presented the CD to their label Warner, it was rejected. The band ended up buying it back, terminating their contract and moving to the more eclectic imprint Nonesuch. (Ironically, Nonesuch is owned by Warner, meaning Wilco are back where they started and Warner ended up buying the album twice. Which pretty much sums up the music business.) So anyway, after that long and painful birth, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will finally be delivered Tuesday. And after cocooning with our advance copy, we have just one thing to say: What the hell was all the fuss about?

From the furore over this CD, you'd think Wilco had gone off the deep end. Abandoned roots-rock for atonal free jazz. Explored the emotionless edifice of electronica. Or, worse yet, added bagpipes. But no.

Bottom Line: This is still a Wilco album. The songs are still roots-based gems, roughly divided between joyously jangly poppers and heart-wrenching weepers. Jeff Tweedy's dusty vocals are still front and centre in the mix. The boys still play with a loose, ramshackle intimacy. The tunes still have verses and choruses, conventional time signatures, melodies and chord changes. Nearly all are played on guitars. Some even have fiddles, for crying out loud.

So what sent the mucky-mucks into conniptions? Well, thanks to noisy arrangements and envelope-pushing production (by the band and post-rocker Jim O'Rourke), this doesn't sound like a Wilco album. Synthesizers buzz and blip ambiently -- and sometimes not so ambiently. Static and feedback are used for texture and atmosphere. The drums clatter and bang with underproduced flatness. Now and then, an atonal clam or off-time misstep lurches into the mix. In other words, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is no A.M. It's slower, moodier, more complex and less commercial. But anyone who's heard Tortoise and Slint -- or even Radiohead and Pavement -- need not cringe in fear.

Indeed, if you dug Kid A, you'll likely savour Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's songs. Or at least applaud their ambition. The sprawling opener I Am Trying to Break Your Heart -- wonder what the suits thought of that title? -- is equal parts strummy ballad and clink-clunk construct, with a toy piano countermelody and drowsy vibe that decays into fuzzy confusion and intermittent feedback. The elegiac Ashes of American Flags, with its eerie mood, fever-dream coda and mortally wounded lyric ("Speaking of tomorrow / How will it ever come?") was written prior to Sept. 11, but offers a different meaning in its wake. The grand Poor Places starts off as a graceful, Beatlesque orch-pop ballad before swirling into a cyclone of noise topped by a deadpan voice repeating the album's title a la Revolution 9. Closer Reservations is a sweeping lament of post-rock psychedelia and tortured sentiment ("I've got reservations about so many things / But not about you") that gives way to a creaky, haunting dirge before fading away like an old photo.

Those who prefer original-flavour Wilco won't go away completely unsatisfied, however. Kamera is an approachable roots-popper. Jesus, etc. is a gently grooving piano-based cut. Ditto War on War, whose hypnotic peacenik groove is broken only by a squirrely synthesizer. And the loping Heavy Metal Drummer -- the CD's most commercial cut -- is a sunny ode to youth, summer love and rock 'n' roll, with the disc's most lighthearted lyrical couplet: "I miss the innocence I've known / Playing KISS covers, beautiful and stoned."

Whether on not you miss the old Wilco, though, it's obvious Yankee Hotel Foxtrot doesn't deserve its difficult reputation. Sure, it could have killed them. But it didn't. It made them and their music stronger. And along with being the finest work of their career -- and one of the best albums of the year -- it points the way toward the limitless promise of their future. That's what all the fuss should have been about.

Now, of course, we just have to wait and see if they can live up to that promise. Or live it down. (More on: Wilco).

Track Listing