Managed to dig up what I was talking about; it was his essay for the 2002 P&J poll. He still seems a bit cool on YHF, but it's a really great piece of writing:
How I tell them apart is that Wilco is the one I tried to hate and ended up respecting and Beck is the one I tried to like and ended up walking around the room until it could get home on its own. As I relistened, it happened again: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was so passive-aggressive I wanted to throttle it, Sea Change so pretty I wanted to tell it I was sorry, only then Beck's songs vaporized as Wilco's took on a weathered solidity. Clearly, though, the two share a genetic code: diffident vocals, winsome tunes, contained tempos, affectless rhythms, and, above all, texture as aesthetic signifier. Nothing wrong with texture, which as timbre, melisma, "microtones," etc. is a prized delicacy in almost every kind of music; in rock and roll, it's been sticking out its tongue at "classical" canons of tonal purity since 1955. But note that its present vogue privileges what once would have been called sound effects, and that these proceed from the sampler and hence hip hop, though in England they say techno. Most would rate Radiohead's OK Computer the apogee of pomo texture, well ahead of Beck's Odelay, but before those two I fell for Latin Playboys. Where OK Computer's sound effects are also alienation effects, all dystopian gloom, fractured groove, and hate-love relationship with technology, on Latin Playboys, David Hidalgo and Louie Perez conjure places and people past and present from Tchad Blake's audio treasure chest, blending them in with a hip, swinging, hip-swinging sense of time. My view of our dystopian prospect is that if I change my mind now about who was right, bin Bush has won.
As a token of their transcendent genius, Wilco split the difference. Our winner is temperate rather than warm or cold, reticent rather than sociable or disaffected, and barely sampled at all--more "treated," or just plain arranged. The way Jeff Tweedy's tunes seep through shifting strata of complication recalls Beck's in Odelay, but Odelay was a lot jollier than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and also than Sea Change, which signals a retreat by abandoning the sampler for sour strings, gobs of reverb, and passably parsable lyrics. Both records make a virtue of their entanglement in disconnected sound, their depressive inability to control an encroaching environment--a defeatism familiar enough from slacker days, only slackers were hyperactive, funny, or at least ironic about it. Wilco's and Beck's integrity comes down to a stubborn determination--distinctly American in its folksy affect and go-it-alone-ism--to tell the world how very ineffective they feel.
Good luck finding anything that interesting on Pitchfork.
