"His goal in life was to be an echo," Jeff Tweedy sings on "Hummingbird," a Beatles-inspired cut from Wilco's new album, A Ghost Is Born.

No one is listening, Tweedy informs us. "In the deep chrome canyons of the loudest Manhattans / no one could hear him" - he pauses - "or anything."

Whether he's talking about himself or not, it is readily apparent that Tweedy is still trying to break your heart.

Ghost comes on the heels of Tweedy's recently publicized struggle with drug addiction and depression, and if this largely impressionistic album has any theme, it is the struggle to retain one's identity - one's soul - through that harrowing night.

Tweedy uses his cryptic lyrics as faint pencil lines and brush strokes, sketching portraits of abused lovers, lost souls, and men who aspire to nothing more than being echoes in the steel canyons of Manhattan.

His characters struggle with their identity throughout the album. On "Wishful Thinking," he writes, "I got up off my hands and knees / to thank my lucky stars that you're not me." Elsewhere, on "Handshake Drugs," Tweedy builds a solid, folk-tinged rock song atop a Motown vibe and then asks, "Exactly what do you want me to be?" before disappearing into a sea cave of fuzzed-out guitar sounds and synthetic loops.

While his characters suffer from identity crises, Ghost suffers from Wilco's self-indulgence. Too many songs on this album fade into long, scratchy guitar parts or 10-minute noise solos.

"Spiders (Kidsmoke)," for instance, works for three minutes as a straightaway techno song, but then wears out its welcome somewhere between the needless repetition of the first verse and the song's final clock time of 10:41.

Penultimate track "Less Than You Think" also overextends its stay, beginning as a pretty piano ballad and ending with the melody and instruments dissolving into a buzzy, metallic static. The whole insufferable thing drags on for exactly 15 minutes before ending.

Caveats aside, there are several wonderful pop songs which succeed one another the middle of the album. Namely, the gentle, breezy "Muzzle of Bees," the softly rolling "Company in My Back" (which features Tweedy's raspy voice shifting to a soul-wilting falsetto), and the album's only instant classic, delivered in the form of a four-chord piano jam titled "Theologians."

The only song that doesn't fit the album's melancholy theme is the final track. The witty "Late Greats" sees Tweedy giving a cheerful nod to the world of underground music, waxing lyrical about lost tracks, unsigned bands, and the greatest singer in rock 'n roll.

It's a brief bit of sunshine, and it takes Wilco an album's worth of lost echoes in steel canyons to get there.