Seventies

Posts Tagged ‘Seventies’

My Morning Jacket’s Latest Album, “Circuital” : The New Yorker

Written on July 27th, 2011 by Larryno shouts

The hippie has long been cast as an opponent to the punk, and an uncool one, at that—the no of the punk against the yes of the hippie. Music is thick with straw men, but this is a genuine beef, with origins in the seventies—the punks thought the longhairs had been going on too long, for too long. But the hippie got a raw deal, all that utopian drive and fury subsumed into a cartoon of unchecked approval, a creature of easily won and essentially personal endorsements. My Morning Jacket, on the recently released album “Circuital,” its sixth, makes it clear that the real hippie is neither biddable nor daft. the band suggests that the punks and hippies may be kin now, their differences finally outweighed by affinities.

In Louisville, Kentucky, in 1999, My Morning Jacket’s lead singer and songwriter, Jim James, wasn’t doing much to change the hippie template. His band’s début, “the Tennessee Fire,” channelled a variety of American rock and folk sources, with amiable results. the harmonies are slightly befuddled and the playing is enjoyable but not entirely compelling. It’s an inviting album, though short on anything like an epiphany. You know these guys are bearded without seeing a photograph of them, and you also know that somebody in the band was seriously worried about songwriting, although he might not have been sure if the verses really connected to the choruses. even when the band stretches out and demonstrates its cohesiveness, you feel the ghost of Jerry Garcia and his rosy-cheeked shuffle.

Twelve years later, James’s band has played Madison Square Garden and seen “Circuital” début at no. 5 on the Billboard top 200 charts. something wonderfully odd has happened: though the punks famously want nothing to do with the system, it was the hippies—because of jam bands like Phish and the String Cheese Incident—who were the first to abandon the traditional music business, at least in part. They built enormous fan bases by touring endlessly. They earned reasonable salaries and were largely freed from worrying about how many records they sold or whether they were played on the radio. when album sales began to crumble and radio fragmented, these bands were mostly unaffected. Phish could “retire” for five years and then come back and cause Live Nation’s ticketing site to crash from overwhelming demand, in 2009. My Morning Jacket sold out its 2008 concert at Radio City Music Hall in just twenty-two minutes.

In this way, My Morning Jacket’s peers also include bands like Beck, Radiohead, and the Flaming Lips. All of these acts started far from where they ended up, sonically, and now can conduct their careers pretty much as they like. their audiences are solid enough that only a decade of white-noise albums might drive them away.

My Morning Jacket has not ranged quite as wide, musically, as its peers, keeping the up-tempo thrashing on the recordings to a minimum; the few forays into electronic lockstep on “Evil Urges,” from 2008, seemed more like comic efforts than like evidence of catholic taste. the center of the band is Jim James’s odd, strong voice. It begins in the high mid-range and moves in deeply unpredictable ways. On “slow Slow Tune,” from “Circuital,” the band filters a classic soul sound through a lovely mesh of reverb and keening notes reminiscent of those on Radiohead’s “OK Computer.” James doesn’t expel much air through his diaphragm, and his tone is woody and satisfying.

On the album’s most charming song, “Holdin On to Black Metal,” he goes into a kind of modified falsetto that could best be described as sweet and sour. It works only because the entire construction is appealingly weird: the song is built on a loop from a nineteen-sixties Thai pop record called “E-Saew Tam Punha Huajai”; the rhythmic bed is a kind of low-key funk shuffle; and James’s lyrics are an oblique defense of a genre, maybe any genre, like punk once, that sustains kids while being the target of parents’ disapproval. “Catching waves on Lucifer’s beach / Taking shade underneath Lucifer’s trees / getting sustenance from Lucifer’s peach / oh black metal it’s affecting all your speech.” There’s a women’s choir, and the whole thing is a colorful, rootless bit of joy.

Recorded in the gymnasium of a Louisville church, “Circuital” is woolly and loose, though the playing is precise. “First Light” is a good example of how great this can sound, even in the service of what is clearly a throwaway song. It has a basic blues structure, attached to a soul horn section, and features a minimal lyric. James pushes his voice past the streaked to the painfully strained. the world has enough of these tunes to last until the final bar band turns to dust, but you admire the acoustics here. A complete letdown is the treacly “Wonderful (The way I Feel),” which sounds a bit like one of Bob Dylan’s oddball eighties moments and shows the downside of James’s earnestness.

More encouraging is the album’s rotating, humid opening track, “Victory Dance,” which sees James in a mode that few other singers can pull off: sheer, unironic optimism that shades into nondenominational worship. “Hey there, I’m flying up above / Looking down on the tired earth / and I can see, I can see potential / Speaking through you, speaking to you / from all of heaven’s possibilities.” the song almost refuses to build, remaining a weave of quiet keyboards and dramatic punctuations, occasionally interrupted by a trilling choir of—what? Lemurs? People? It’s hard to say. this modified, cinematic take on the ballad is where My Morning Jacket finds a vein that feels rich with possibility. All the sonic paint-flinging of the post-sixties musical era can be corralled into the service of a simple song, one that collapses in a lovely, crabbed burst of harmonic guitar playing.

My Morning Jacket’s Latest Album, “Circuital” : The New Yorker