Review: My Morning Jacket • It Still Moves

[DudeAsInCool]

My Morning Jacket

It Still Moves

[ATO/BMG; 2003]

It's that moment every indie kid irrationally fears: your favorite band gets the call-up to the majors. Now that they've come to prominence via the California-based indie Darla Records, it's My Morning Jacket's turn to risk their careers and financial stability for a shot at recording a real statement album backed by a serious budget. But something's not right here, or maybe something's too right: Jim James' high, lonesome croon is still recorded in a grain silo, and the band's sound is still a cathedral of reverb, but where you might expect grandiose 40-piece orchestras, bombastic gospel choirs and glossy, state-of-the-art digital effects, you will find only the vast, empty space that has always accompanied the band's instrumentation, allowing each note to resonate indefinitely, unhampered by unnecessary density. Rest assured, the faithful will have no problem kneeling here.

Last year's exploratory Chocolate & Ice EP left quite a few open questions about the band's future direction, many signals of which could be found in the 24-minute electro-funk centerpiece "Cobra". But It Still Moves almost immediately confirms that the spacy Southern psych that My Morning Jacket built their name on remains their bread and butter. "Mahgeetah" is full of the long, drawn-out vocals that made "Can You See the Hard Helmet on My Head?" such an affecting and seemingly meaningful question; it also carries over the texture of that song, building a small epic out of the same elements. The band reacts to each verse differently-- once with explosions of glimmering arpeggios, later with Johnny Quaid's beautiful, understated guitar solo-- before bringing the whole thing to one of those thunderous conclusions that makes classic rock live albums such a guilty pleasure.

"Golden" trots through a glowing haze of reverb on Patrick Hallahan's steadily brushed beat, its lilting finger-picking and ghostly harmonies falling somewhere between The Band's stately Canadicana and The Byrds' "Ballad of Easy Rider". "One Big Holiday" doesn't look like much from the lyrics in the liners, but when James grabs hold of the opening line, "Wakin' up feeling good and limber," and draws it out in his singular way, it feels about a million times more weighty than it probably should. Near the album's midpoint, the reverb reaches such titanic proportions that James' drifting vocals begin to rival Sigur Rós' Jon Thor Birgisson for shear ethereality, particularly on a track like "I Will Sing You Songs". It's like listening in the throes of a lucid dream.

"Easy Morning Rebel" puts your feet back on the ground with its swinging arrangement and Memphis horns (actually played by veteran Stax session men-- one of the rare frills here made available by major label dollars). And then, finally, the band leaves James alone in his silo to close the album with the searching, desperate "One in the Same", a song that finds him seemingly trying to sort fragmented memories into coherent thoughts. When he hits the lines, "It wasn't till I woke up/ That I could hold down a joke or a job or a dream/ But then all three are one in the same," it should put a lump in your throat.

And with that, It Still Moves strums to a close, an album by turns beautiful and possessed, by others raucous and fiery. If you're standing by the record racks trying to choose between this and the band's other major achievement, At Dawn, flip a coin; either way, you win. My Morning Jacket have made the move to the bigs in tremendous style, and as far as I can tell they haven't compromised a thing to be there. If there's one major flaw I could point to here, it'd be the album's length-- 74 minutes is a long runtime for any record, and as a result, the album is usually better off listened to in chunks-- but that's a small concern considering the riches that await inside.

-Joe Tangari, Pitchfork • September 18th, 2003