Okay, show of hands: how many of you people have listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot recently? Yeah, that's about what I expected, 'cause you know, I haven't pulled it out much lately myself. That kind of bothers me. YHF did, after all, cling battered and bruised to the top spot on my list for the Palindromic Year, and one would expect it would have a better shelf-life, even though it's been wink-wink-available for nigh on two years.

Now, before you start sharpening your Outlook, know that this is not an official Pitchfork backlash war cry, but a mere personal assessment. I was, you should know, the staff's staunchest defender of YHF's canonization, enduring countless hipster rants about its dad-rock/easy-listening nature and the impressionability of the nation's boomer crits. For a period of about nine months, anyone so unlucky as to be around me after three or four beers got to hear my pulpit speech about the horizon-widening effect that Jeff Tweedy & Co.'s masterwork could have on the general populace.

Maybe it's because of this intense love affair that I don't reach for YHF so much anymore, in favor of albums that slipped through my fingers while I proselytized about the genius last two minutes of "Reservations". Surely, then, this miniature collectible e-EP-- originally released as a deal-sweetener for YHF-buyers down under, and now streaming and/or downloadable (if you're an honorable sort) from the Wilco website-- would rekindle some of the romance? Packaging two of the better YHF outtakes with four more recent songs, More Like the Moon is timed like a snack to tide us over while the band gallivants around the U.S. with Sonic Youth and R.E.M. instead of RECORDING A NEW ALBUM DAMMIT WHY WON'T YOU FINISH ITTTTTT!

But for those of us pulling for Tweedy to keep the laptop plugged in, More Like the Moon will stream a bit hollow due to its focus on that old humdrum, outdated tool, the guitar. Two tracks-- the unfamiliar "Woodgrain" and solo-show mainstay "Bob Dylan's 49th Beard"-- are little more than street-corner-strumming Tweedy, "Kamera" resurfaces in grungier form as "Camera", and the title track and "Handshake Drugs" feature extended soloing twixt the verses.

Your enjoyment of those last two tracks will probably determine your final score, as they stretch out over more than half of the EP's twenty minutes and change. "Handshake Drugs" comes off the better of the pair, employing a reclined groove and muffled "Only a Northern Song" noise breaks. "More Like the Moon", on the other hand, is an extremely straightforward purty ballad, with extended near-Flamenco picking lending the track a Chi-Chi's-style ambience. Yeah, it's somewhat moving and hardly faultable, but the bar is set too high now for Wilco to coast like they do here, restricting drummer Glenn Kotche to a first-day-of-drum-school beat and key-man Leroy Bach to gentle organ fills.

The only other misfire of the six tracks is "Camera", a bassy, fuzzed-out version that tramples over the delightfully subtle progression from folk-rock to laser guns in the original. But an arena-size "A Magazine Called Sunset" comes out better than expected, given the several lackluster Springsteen-esque demo versions floating about-- even if it sounds more like a Summerteeth outtake than a Yankee cut (count 1, 2, 3 keyboards in the first thirty seconds and know that Jay Bennett is in the hizzouse). The two folky tracks squeak by on lyrical grins, with Tweedy going meta on "Woodgrain" (break out your touchdown bandaids for the self-ref "Sometimes I rhyme/ Sometimes I don't") and making a defense mechanism out of Dylan's facial hair on "Beard".

If you find the whole effort a tad bit underwhelming, there may be good reasons why; to connect the dots with the stopgap from the other 10.0 hate-mail-inducer of last year, Trail of Dead's The Secret of Elena's Tomb EP seems like a dressing room for the band to try on possible future directions, while More Like the Moon sounds like Wilco cleaning out their fridge, even though it's only 33% leftovers. It's not that the sextet of material here plants any seeds of doubt about the band's future trajectory-- road-tested tracks like "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" indicate there's plenty o' future to be excited about-- it's just that this release is less a tease for what lies ahead than an audit of last year's receipts.

But you can easily forgive More Like the Moon for being a bit of a dry-hump, due to its free and easy distribution on Wilco's website. This gracious move is a reminder of what might have been the real epi-musical "Meaning of YHF": the digital-utopia-hinting fact that it was streamed on the band's own site and easy to find on file-sharing bazaars, yet still became Wilco's biggest unit-shifter by a mile, very likely due to (really, could it have been?!?) its Internet leakage.

All the same, my drunken YHF ramblings stay retired, replaced by an even more ludicrous sermon about how The Rapture are going to reinvent indie music based around the mere two songs I've heard from their upcoming full-length. Don't get me wrong, I still stand convinced that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot opened up a lot of aunts' and uncles' ears to new sounds, and assuming Loose Fur didn't shut all of them back up, it's a spell that's still working. Still, More Like the Moon is far too safe a play to keep that momentum rolling between full-lengths, and fails to rise above the fan-club gift bonus it is.

-Rob Mitchum, April 28th, 2003