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Maybe the most challenging thing about Wilco’s sixth and seventh LPs— into the formalist, featherweight Sky Blue Sky and retrospective-in-repose of Wilco (The Album)— is just how unchallenging they were. These records seemed at times curiously unambitious, coming as they did from one of the most forward-thinking American bands of the last decade and change. Wilco made their early reputation on their creative restlessness, their ongoing identity crisis, but since 2004’s A Ghost Is Born— still, by some distance, their most difficult work— their music’s seemed something of a retreat from their early-decade boundary-shoving. Wilco’s great strength lies not just in Jeff Tweedy’s world-weary inscrutability, but the ways he and the band matched those stark, sometimes startling sentiments to expectation-defying deconstructions of Americana. The best thing about The Whole Love, Wilco’s adventurous, elliptical eighth LP, is the ease with which they’ve recaptured some of that old unpredictability: From Being There through A Ghost Is Born, the band’s best work has always perched itself upon the edge of traditionalism and experimentation, and The Whole Love is the first of their albums in years not to shy away from such risks.