My Morning Jacket is a roots-rock band from Louisville (Kentucky) fronted by
vocalist Jim James.
The double-CD Early Recordings (Darla, 2005) collects their first singles.
Their The Tennessee Fire (Darla, 1999) delivered
simple country-rock melodies highlighted by haunting arrangements and
haunting vocals.
Alt-country, southern-rock and power-pop meet on At Dawn (Darla, 2000),
a monolith that packs enough refrains and riffs for an entire Kentucky bar-band
dynasty.
At Dawn opens with sinister electronic noise before James intones his loud and solemn lament.
The band swings between the catchy singalong
Just Because I Do, which manages to mix Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd,
and
laid-back folk-rock litanies like The Way That He Sings and
I Needed It Most
via
Bacharach-esque pop arias like Lowdown and X-mas Curtain.
The somnolent Hopefully exudes a transcended feeling especially in its instrumental coda. The eight-minute slow blues-rock Honest Man sounds like a stoned version of ZZ Top.
The extremes are the
spartan Taj Mahal-esque meditation If It Smashes Down and the spaced-out anenic Strangulation.
It Still Moves (BMG, 2003) is a bit too polished for their kind of
music, but their take on
southern-rock (Dancefloors, One Big Holiday, Mahgeetah)
and the nine-minute meditation I Will Sing You Songs (which achieves
Built To Spill-ian transcendence)
almost save the disc from its unwise (reverb-heavy) production values.
Chapter 1: The Sandworm Cometh (Darla, 2005) and
and Chapter 2: Learning (Darla, 2005)
collect
unreleased early tracks and rarities.
Z (ATO, 2005) was more of a producer's success (John Leckie)
than a songwriter's success, but it still meant
that My Morning Jacket had finally focused on what they wanted to be.
The album was a sonic exploration of ordinary states of mind
conjuring up visions of the most baroque REM ballads, of the prettiest
Tom Petty elegies, and even of U2's bombastic arena rock.
Studies on ambience such as Wordless Chorus, Into the Woods,
Dondante enhance the parade of off-kilter rocking tunes
(Lay Low, What A Wonderful Man, Off the Record, Anytime).
Okonokos (ATO, 2006) is a double-CD album.
Evil Urges (2008) boasts a goofy funk-soul-rock
hybrid Highly Suspicious and the seriously depressed and electronic
Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt 1 (not to mention its
eight-minute remix as Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt 2).
The new course of the band might be the falsetto soul of Evil Urges,
though. However, the album is redeemed by Smokin from Shootin and Thank You Too, two of their gems at the border of southern-rock and acid-rock.
Bright Eyes'
Conor Oberst and
Mike Mogis,
My Morning Jacket's
Jim James,
and
M Ward
formed the
Monsters Of Folk in the vein of
Crosby Stills Nash & Young,
and released the ambitious
Monsters Of Folk (2009), containing
Dear God and Slow Down Jo.
Jim James performed covers of the late George Harrison on the EP Tribute To (2009).
Crosby Stills Nash & Young must have been
the inspiration for the supergroup formed by
Son Volt's Jay Farrar, Centro-matic's Will Johnson, Anders Parker
and My Morning Jacket's Jim James that debuted with
New Multitudes (2012), a concept devoted to reinventing the music for
old Woody Guthrie lyrics.
Best is James' Talking Empty Bed Blues, that recaptures the dejected
pathos of the "dust bowl ballads".
My Morning Jacket
built on the stylistic confusion of Evil Urges
to explore the creative arrangements of
Circuital (2011). The tenderly melodic Outta My System
is emblematic of how the simplest idea gets dressed up elegantly and
smoothly.
The problem is that these are songs that take forever to announce their
personality, and, when they finally do, you keep waiting for some soaring
change, but instead the song quietly perpetuates itself until it dies away.
Best is the yodeling Neil Young-ian lament of Circuital, slowly morphing
into a Bob Dylan-ian shuffle.
James released the solo album Regions of Light and Sound of God (2013).
The Waterfall (2015),
containing
Like a River,
Get the Point,
Spring and
the seven-minute Only Memories Remain,
was a more than decent effort, more psychedelic-sounding than any previous one.
The Waterfall II (2020) was recorded in the same session of
The Waterfall and so by definition it contains leftovers, notably the
funky Magic Bullet and the country-ish Climbing the Ladder.
The mellow sound of this era is best represented by
My Morning Jacket (2021), which includes
Never in the Real World and breaks new ground in the longer songs
(the seven-minute In Color,
the eight-minute I Never Could Get Enough,
the nine-minute The Devil's in the Details).
Is (2025), produced by Brendan O'Brien contains
Time Waited, Squid Ink and Half a Lifetime,
but it's mostly a minor work.
