A Guide to My Morning Jacket

A fecund, spacious haze seems to follow My Morning Jacket everywhere (and I don’t mean that peculiar Bonnaroo smog either). Ever since their debut, the band has been deploying spring-reverb for all facets of their sound, from Jim James’ yelp to the peculiar corners the band so skillfully carpenters. So while the echo is always evident on Z, with the help of new keyboardist Bo Koster My Morning Jacket now emphasize the “spring” of said equation, with their sprightliest, most pliant set of studio songs to date. Skankable skips and R&B shuffles cast bright lights across their grooves, the prevalent haze and hanging vines cleared just enough to reveal the architecture beneath. A calliope organ pinwheels into “Anytime”’s anthemic drive, while the radio-friendly “Off the Record” shows off a newfound reggae lilt.

Rapturous rock remains their forte, though. New Testament allusions lay just below the surface on songs like “What a Wonderful Man He Was” and “Gideon,” both songs as ebullient as anything their closest counterparts, the Flaming Lips, ever encapsulated. And am I the only one that hears Eddie Rabbit’s “Step By Step” in “Lay Low”? A cathartic crescendo makes closer “Dondante” feel mountainous, the music slowly dissipating at disc’s end like so many clouds.

Reverb. Neil Young sucking down a joint while warbling about the lonely ladies of the Laurel Canyon. More reverb. The netherworld where the Black Crowes’ bulimic bad-ass boogie collides with Music from Big Pink. Still more reverb. Dave Gilmour on holiday in Ibiza, comfortably numb and obscured by clouds. The Church of the Sacred Reverb, led by your pastor, the Reverend Jim James. Glory to you, reverb.

These are some first-blush reactions to My Morning Jacket’s third album and 2003 major-label debut, It Still Moves. Simply put: it’s the spacious sound of southern psychedelia; the logical synthesis of the Flaming Lips’ lysergic fever dreams and the Allman Brothers’ chops-flaunting excursions to the center of your mind (circa Eat a Peach) filtered through the country-boy-fer-life sensibilities of frontman Jim James, whose high/lonesome wail is bathed in so much sonic echo that it sometimes sounds like it was recorded down in his native Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave.

For all the accomplishments represented on It Still Moves (including some of the best compositions of James’ career: the picture-perfect ballad “Golden,” the dreamlike standstill of “I Will Sing You Songs”), the album represented a breaking point with MMJ Mach I. James’ guitarist cousin Johnny Quaid and original keyboardist Danny Cash both left the band after its recording, clearing the way for the extraterrestrial explorations of 2005’s Z and the group’s next-phase admixture of not quite alt-country and not quite alt-rock. Until proven otherwise, It Still Moves is still their masterpiece.

Although 9/11 hadn’t yet happened when My Morning Jacket released their second album in April 2001, it feels like a bulletin from a war zone: heartland America, mythologized in songs from Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway” to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” to Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” has become a burned-out industrial shell where kids wander the streets all night, fighting an enemy that isn’t there and trying to make sense of what they haven’t got. The sonic elements aren’t especially new — alt-country infused with record-bin detritus like rockabilly, delta blues, gospel and ’60s psychedelia — but the reverb-laden arrangements, wastrel guitar jams and bungled banjo notes hum with a hard-edged loneliness that feels more daring and unsparing than anything in years.

“Xmas Curtain” tosses in steel drum and the high-pitched guitar whine from “Leyla”; “Phone Heads West” slows ska down to sludge. “Lowdown” ought to blare from a parking lot dashboard while the saps dance at the prom inside. Like most of the songs, it isn’t about much, except the hope that music and maybe love will make the world more tolerable. “Some say death is the easy way and I think they’re right/ 'Cause nights tick by like a long week except when you stop by,” Jim James sings in “Death Is My Sleazy Play.” He’s right: an album this sweeping and unflinching does make the world a better place.

Before they became an arena-filling live powerhouse, My Morning Jacket were a countrified lo-fi outfit from Louisville whose miniscule recording budget went to whatever implement might give them a bit more reverb. Like the songwriters in the Band, MMJ leader Jim James knows his old-time rock, country, blues and folk; also like the songwriters in the Band, he chooses to honor classic songs by writing new ones that could fit alongside them. So while the sound quality of My Morning Jacket's 1999 debut is crude and primitive by the standards of their later work, the strength of the material easily carries the day. And for anyone who has ever been drawn to a certain strain of indie music specifically for its roughhewn, handmade quality, well, The Tennessee Fire has the ring of a stone classic.

The best songs here sound eerily familiar, like maybe you heard them crackling through the dashboard during some long drive when you couldn't quite catch the signal. "They Ran," a waltz that drifts in like the Flamingos performing "I Only Have Eyes For You" at the Grand Ole Opry with Lee Hazlewood running sound, positively bleeds lost highway ambiance and serves as a tribute to the transformative power of AM radio. "Evelyn Is Not Real," a loping mid-tempo weeper, is ghostly and ethereal but also brimming with confidence, the sound of a band fully aware of its power. A number of songs feature James virtually alone. Some of these, like "Nashville to Kentucky" and "Butch Cassidy," find him layering his voice into echoing towers of harmony that reference country music's mid-century golden age; others, like "If All Else Fails," are stark and acoustic but no less effective. An often muted and intimate album perfect for the wee hours, The Tennessee Fire proves that early My Morning Jacket had it from the get-go.

In retrospect, it’s hard to believe that My Morning Jacket were ever a small underground band, signed to Darla and playing basement clubs — their sound always contained a stadium-filling grandeur. Jim James’s voice aimed heavenwards before they ever set foot on Bonnaroo’s starlit festival stage, the drums thundering past the horizon, the dueling guitars suggesting nothing less than the Fillmore East version of “Whipping Post.” Which is apropos, in that My Morning Jacket’s live double album Okonokos was recorded at the Fillmore in San Francisco over a two-night stand on November 11-12, 2005.

Drawing heavily from their ATO albums It Still Moves and Z (though they dust off “I Think I’m Going to Hell” from The Tennessee Fire and "The Way That He Sings" from At Dawn), the songs captured here are sonically expansive, though they thankfully don’t come off in any way as jammy. “Run Thru” doubles in length effortlessly while “Steam Engine” chugs the furthest out, courtesy of an obligatory drum solo. “Off the Record” swirls into an extended blissed-out coda and inexplicably “Dondante” sounds twice as massive as it did on Z. Throughout, James’s voice is in fine mettle, with traces of Wayne Coyne, Levon Helm, Kermit the Frog, Neil Young and Bruce Hornsby bubbling up in his throat. Thankfully, James is leviathan enough to embody all of them yet still remain wholly himself.

Kentuckian Jim James, with assorted relatives and friends, works out on long, shambolic jams in his grandparents' barn, in service to the Canuck daïmon that animates most neo-redneck rockers of a certain age: Neil Young. Former farm boy James, possessed of a high lonesome quaver and trigger-happy with the reverb, also produces music best experienced live, this disc presenting the embryonic stage of his Louisville quintet's "sheets of sound" process. Half-stepping as they do between soil verities and rock & roll glamour, My Morning Jacket seems on a mission to provide neo-classic Americana and digital spirituals for those of us who believe in "more barn!"