A Guide to My Morning Jacket

The two tracks that bookend My Morning Jacket’s fifth album attest to that centuries-old Christian body/soul divide that sits at the root of good church folk like Jim James and his cohorts. On the one hand, there’s “Evil Urges,” the other, “Good Intentions,” and MMJ know as well as anybody that hell is paved with both of them — meaning the middle path is best. If anything, My Morning Jacket strike a precarious balance on Evil Urges, being still familiar to longtime fans while also reaching for extremes in their sound.

The opening title track swoops in like something beamed down from Radiohead’s OK Computer, anthemic guitars amid spacy keyboard washes, as the conflicted James realizes that “It ain’t evil, baby, if it ain’t hurting anybody.” Much like another Kentuckian, Will Oldham, James couples his choirboy exterior with the animal desires that lurk beneath, mining the fertile fold where the two meet. Or, simply put, James finally digs that the closest one can get to heaven is through some fine fucking. He fantasizes about a “Librarian” hiding “the beauty the Good Lord put there” and aims to help her to find that heaven within. And, with an orgasmic yowl, he looses heaps of sexual frustration on the sublime disco(!) workout “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 2.”

Such lower-half excursions aren’t always divine though; “Highly Suspicious” will make-or-break Urges for a lot of fans. It’s an odd amalgam of canned '80s keytar, complete with a non-sequitur about “peanut butter pudding surprise” and bolstered by James’s highest falsetto and most robo-baritone. If anything, it sounds like the band’s attempt to do Brazilian funk carioca, complete with “Wild Thing” guitar lick. Thankfully, they just as easily swoop back into the familiar soft-rock beatitude of “Thank You Too!” and the demur keen of “Sec Walkin.’” Here, James gauges his every step carefully, exulting in earthly delights around him. Yet all is not well, as he also notes the “demon eyes are watching everywhere.” And so the dark and light forces continue their push and pull.

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.

On its second album for Darla Records, My Morning Jacket are perfect. That is to say, they haven't changed a bit, and we like them that way. At Dawn is full of the same strumming acoustic guitar, hauntingly treated vocals, country, blues, and everything else that made The Tennessee Fire a magnificent country, rock, and Americana stew. When Jim James (singer and group leader) sings, "We start this time with open ears," you know you're heading into familiar territory. Open ears were what you needed the first time you took this trip with James and the rest of My Morning Jacket. Open ears led you through the stark and beautiful landscape of The Tennessee Fire, and now they take you on a very similar trip. A little bit of sunshine in "Lowdown," "The Way He Sings," and "Just Because I Do," and a little bit of rain in "If It Smashes Down" and "I Needed It Most." At Dawn finds a very young band hitting their stride. Echoes of Galaxie 500, For Stars, and classic Americana (Neil Young, the Band, Dylan, the Velvet Underground, etc.) find their way into this record to varying degrees, but they seem to float along lending help and comfort, rather than showing themselves directly. Like Belle & Sebastian, My Morning Jacket's songs have remained essentially the same -- just the way we like them.

My Morning Jacket is a four-piece band from Louisville, KY, led by singer/songwriter Jim James. The songs on Tennessee Fire (Darla 1999) evoke warm (and somewhat lonely) memories of a gothic country night. Electric and acoustic guitars, harmonica, lap-steel, drums and bass all join his unique (Neil Young meets Wayne Coyne) voice in a huge pool of reverb. At first you wonder if the sound will overtake the songs, but after the first chorus you realize that the beauty of these simple and emotive songs is only enhanced by the addition of this effect, and by the end of the first song, you can't even tell that it's there. Released to (world) wide critical acclaim, Tennessee Fire provides proof (200 proof) that heartfelt American music is alive and well, and living in KY. A must for anyone who loves the sound of alt-country mixed with wide-open spaces.

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!"