The album is largely a collection of songs that examine relationships and life via extended metaphors that draw on symbols from the collective American consciousness (from point-and-shoot cameras and old-timey radio hucksters to LA Glam Rock) with ambient noise continuously arising to break things apart or bring things into piercing focus. Glancing at the sepia-toned album cover depicting Chicago's twin Marina Towers, it feels even more chillingly prophetic than Jeff Tweedy & Co. ever intended and ultimately more cathartic than they ever could have fathomed.
"Ashes of American Flags" is the literal apex of the album and the most blatant synthesis of Tweedy's commentary on America as metaphor for his own issues, pains, and disappointments. He takes something as mundane as getting $100 bucks from an ATM machine and buying $3.63 worth of Diet Coke and cigarettes, and he makes it feel like an Edward Hopper painting set to music. It captures the simultaneous promise and paradox of the American dream, of wide-open spaces and "a good life," tempered with the reality of singing for your supper in the middle of nowhere and wondering what it all means, if anyone really cares, and how/if tomorrow will ever come.
It's a bucolic folk ballad at its heart, only it's a heart in that's in the process of breaking, and you hear it crack a little more every time the those four haunting notes on guitar ring out every few measures. But then there's rebirth by fire in the last minute of the song: ashes to ashes and the end of the beginning, as you hear the first chords of "Heavy Metal Drummer" struggle to break through.
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