Favourites : My Morning Jacket

One day last week while scrolling through the iPod for music to play I stopped on My Morning Jacket and put it on shuffle.  Over the next four hours I worked though the four albums and one ep I have of theirs and was struck with how uniformly excellent the songs, playing and singing were as the band morphed between styles but always with an unmistakable MMJ swagger.

I had forgotten just how good this band is.

This is certainly one band that I think can foot it with the best of the late 60's early 70's bands.  They do not get the same reverence though,  partly because  there is now so much more choice of good music and also because style gurus have so much more say in what is cool and what is not.  Bands are not often given second chances and large stylistic experimentation can be fatal rather than taken as a sign of genius.  I often think it would be interesting how some of those classic bands of the 60's and 70's would fare if they were if they were starting now or in the 90's.  How would The Doors be rated? Would Led Zeppelin have managed to get past the difficult third album and would anyone even have listened to Forever Changes.

The first MMJ album I bought was their second album It Still Moves.  It is an album of southern country with some solid guitar boogie and heavily reverbed vocals.  There was something there and I guess it was that something that inspired the choice of MMJ to play Free Bird in the closing scene of the great music road movie Elizabethtown.


There was no real clue on that album as to the experimentation that would start to really blossom on their third album Z. I really loved this album when it came out.  It got great reviews  then grew tired of it and now love it again.   From the opening ethereal funkiness of Wordless Chorus, through the Hawaii 5 O riffing around Off The Record

The next album was the disco/funk influenced Evil Urges.  This was the start of critics questioning them.  At about this time lead singer Jim James (and sometimes Yim Yames for contractual reasons) started appearing on other people's albums. It was not well received at the time but I enjoy it and play it often.  There are some startling rock songs on it includingI'm Amazed, Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, Good Intentions and Highly Suspicious and it was around the release of this album that the family saw the band when they played both Big Day Out and opened for Neil Young in Melbourne.

By the time Circuital was released My Morning Jacket were no longer critics darlings and the album was poorly reviewed ... at first but it is interesting it has 4.5 stars in Amazon readers' reviews.  Standout tracks for me are Circuital, Slow Slow Tune, Wonderful (The Way I Feel), Outta My System and Holdin' on to Black Metal.  Perhaps their best work.

They have been quiet for a while with more Jim James side projects - I hope there will be something new soon.