Wilco’s 10th album, Schmilco, is the photo negative of its predecessor, 2015’s Star Wars. The overall blueprint is identical: the shits-and-giggles title (a not-so-subtle allusion to Harry Nilsson), the brief running time, the seemingly tossed-off vibe. But the colors are inverted: Where Star Wars found Jeff Tweedy and company dusting off their distortion pedals, Schmilco is defined by the solace of acoustic guitars and half-whispered hooks. The band makes its intentions clear with opener “Normal American Kids”—little more than a faint strum and hazy vocal, decorated by a first-take electric guitar that meanders in and out of tune. Tweedy excels when the stakes are low, relying on his eternally wise rasp and poetic nonsense. (The narrator on melancholy sing-along “We Aren’t the World (Safety Girl)” is “blank as a cake and in love like a stupid lump of clay.”) But with their low-key pace and sparse arrangements, tracks like the twangy, galloping “Cry All Day” and country-punk oddity “Someone to Lose” take longer than expected to burrow into your brain. Subtle sonic tics reveal themselves over time: GlennKotche’s hoedown tom-tom flourishes on “Quarters,” the marimba and crawling-spider guitars on subversive head-fuck “Common Sense.” Schmilco eases into a blissful groove in its final stretch. “Why am I in my skin again?/ I don’t know how it works,” Tweedy ponders over moaning bass and pitter-patter snares on tearjerker “Just Say Goodbye.” Rest assured: Wilco have never sounded more at ease in their own skin.