HelloAngel
ONE love, blood, life
[SIMG]http://forum.interference.com/gallery/data//585/11265IMG_1385-sml.jpg[/SIMG]
By Andy Smith, Contributing Editor
2007.1
Having toured incessantly since “Z” was released in October 2005 (including a stint opening for Pearl Jam), Louisville's My Morning Jacket just played the last shows of two short tours that followed the release of their live epic “Okonokos.”
To mark this moment, two dedicated fans from Nebraska got stuck in the ice and missed Friday night but finally made it Saturday for their first Jacket show. Traveling devotees flew in from around the country, including one woman from Los Angeles who came via the band's last show in Salt Lake City—she'd taken time off work to follow them since the legendary New Year's Eve shows at San Francisco's Fillmore. One woman from Japan currently living in Colorado will see her first show since the band played Tokyo.
While I am generally skeptical of competition and comparisons and generalizations and platitudes, I am about to lay it all down plain and simple. And while I hate to break it to the fans of other bands, I have seen the future of rock and roll, and its name is My Morning Jacket, as the two-night stand in Denver shared with the fans and confirmed with the universe some otherworldly shape-shifting ecstasy. As great students of rock themselves, the Jacket channels their classic influences in a spiritual, non-derivative way. They are rock stars in terms of theatrics, but not pretension or ego. We can hear the echoes of Radiohead, Neil Young, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and so many more.
On stage in strange costumes, Jim James holds court like a science-fiction action-figure protagonist carrying his band of brothers into ever more majestic and mystic moments of pure sonic poetry. This is what rock and roll was supposed to be in their bedrooms when they were 14 and has been engraved on the souls of teenage air-guitarists everywhere. No wonder Cameron Crowe put them in a movie playing “Freebird.” It’s because Crowe appreciates the mix tape of the soul like few others in Hollywood, as evidenced by the story of “Almost Famous” and the cheesy but priceless ending of “Elizabethtown.”
To experience all of it in such intimacy two nights in a row is profound. To tell of its cinematic and religious qualities is point others to the sounds. But of course this means that the career should take these guys to the next level next time—which means I must cherish this closeness and ineffable camaraderie now. Someday they may hold stadiums rapt, and I can only pray they keep the same playful seriousness in tact. Meanwhile, mainstream radio ignores them, so we know it is through the albums and the shows, the internet and places like the theatrical screenings of “Okonokos” that we can gather like a tribe, each of us wearing the morning jacket of his or her choice.
Photo courtesy of Julio Enriquez for cause=time.
And frankly, and honestly, and I can only say this heartfully after seeing MMJ in Denver for two nights, I've rarely seen a band put on a live show like the Jacket. Best live band on the planet right now. Best old school rock band of our time. Great by any standards. Big words, yes, and deserving of them this band is.
Wildly, they're still relatively underground. I still can't get over how cozy the venues they sell out are. With five albums behind them, these late twenty-something’s are the music fringe's best kept secret, even after owning a share of what the American rock festival means from Coachella to Bonnaroo to Lollapalooza and many of the smaller festivals and on and on.
Having seen this ferocious five-piece at Bonnaroo and the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, I am utterly shocked by both the small size of the Ogden, the lack of a line at doors, and the sparse crowd so close to curtain. Having played to only a handful of folks Friday, opening act Elvis Perkins in Dearland went on late Saturday.
Listing their influences online as “the sun, wind, rain, fire, the sea, gravity, stars, death, the night, Time, the planets, their moons and ours,” Elvis Perkins in Dearland speak in the pure language of what's come to be known as alt-folk or freak folk (and reminding me of Dylan, Nick Drake, Alexi Murdoch, and Devandra Banhart.) Another critic compared 'em to John Lennon and the Band; either way, this group grooves with traditional instruments like acoustic guitar, harmonica, stand-up bass, harmonium, trombone, and an antique marching-band bass drum. Their sets were filled with carnival-esque sweetness, surreal lyrics, and an obvious admiration for the headliners. After two memorably puckish sets, I plan to make myself much more familiar with their stuff before seeing them again in two months. With only two weeks off, this group will tour all winter and into spring. Their next show is in Dublin.
The break between bands passed quickly both nights—just enough time to hit the bathroom and the bar and get back to where your spot was being saved for lights down and Jacket up at 9:30pm sharp. “One Big Holiday” proved the perfect opener Friday, and we were off. (The same song reappeared the second night toward the end of the first set, where it practically took the roof off the Ogden.)
The shows had many breathtaking, mind-stretching moments. When James's pipes climbed to the high, high notes at the end of “Wordless Chorus,” the “weeowoohwah” or whatever-it-is-so-angelic-and-eerie-that he does struck itself inside my soul. He finds a similar synthesis of soul-soothing and spirit-shocking inside “It Beats for You” (which was the second night opener, casting a sacred and hair-raising spell on the whole place).
Photo courtesy of Julio Enriquez for cause=time.
Just as James finds such elusive epiphanies with his vocal yoga, the band bends its own massive metaphors when channeling the classic-rock gods—as in the spacier, harder, longer, let's-not-call-them-jam-band-moments of tracks like “Lay Low,” “Run Thru,” “Steam Engine,” and “Mahgeetah.”
The crossover appeal to jam band fans everywhere should not be understated, but it should not be misrepresented or misinterpreted either. The Jacket groks the integrity of the song and gives its live rendition the space to breathe, but not the space to grow like mold into boring, self-referential, cock-rocking whateverland. They take us to the outer galaxies and back, sure. Yes, they can sustain a musical thought for more than ten minutes, and they can get tweaky and freaky and geeky in the most gifted manner. But they return to rock's mission statement in a way that's both refreshing and chilling, understanding a vocation to write and perform rock songs—not to randomly splash sounds on the aural canvas.
In one of his few moments of speechifying between songs on Friday, James referred directly to the death-defying drives, of trusting the tour bus driver to face the snow drifts safely. He also mentioned flu in the whole crew, suggesting that no one kiss the band-members tonight. When we think about the first night's 115-minute set in the context of how utterly whipped they all appeared, we can understand how heroic they still are in spite of it, giving 200% for the fans who risked as much just getting there, too. But Saturday, the band seemed born again, breathing fire into a breathtaking show that lasted until midnight without much of a break. The “encore” was really just a second set, clocking in at some 55 minutes.
Such over-the-top energy from a band that only 24 hours earlier had seemed just a little ragged was revelatory and refreshing. Who plays at least two hours or more every night? Who switches the set list every night? Over the course of this last mini-tour, some nights were mirrors, but at least one song would inevitably change. In Denver, we got treated to two completely changed shows as delicately dissimilar chapters forming a complete rock and roll masterpiece.
Every aspect of these gigs just felt like family, with all the fans up front forming a reflection of the bands loving, laughing, prankish camaraderie—theirs evidenced by Patrick Hallahan and Bo Koster playfully attacking each other like adolescents in a locker room, tossing towels and playing with toy guns.
Another family member of the band is called reverb—best defined as “the acoustic environment that surrounds a sound.” One very cold Colorado Friday night, the Ogden Theatre patrons were soaked in sacred reverb and smoked-out by second-hand reefer fumes. Throughout both shows, I could lose the bone-cold chills and loosen my scarf and feel the heat of: Carl Broemel and James's dueling guitars; Hallahan 's cymbal-riffs rocketing through my head; Two-Tone Tommy's bass bad-assedly thumping my third-eye; and Koster's bopping keyboard cool keeping it soulful and real.
Rock and roll wizards each of them, the Jacket have set a new standard for nailing each song as if the earth depended on it and playing each show as if it were their last. Other bands, please take some notes. MMJ has something so sincere to offer, frothing with showmanship but not showing off. I love how tight and completely communal the shows are now, but I imagine bigger things for these deserving guys. It's not a secret I can keep. If you love rock and roll and everything you thought it had lost through 30 years of shitty sell-out commercialism, go see the Jacket. Their next gig is at the Langerado Festival in Florida in March, and we'll all be surprised if they don't show up at Bonnaroo again.
Stay tuned.
For more information on My Morning Jacket, please visit the official website and MySpace page. “Okonokos” was released on ATO Records in September, and “Okonokos: The Concert” was released October 31st.
By Andy Smith, Contributing Editor
2007.1
Having toured incessantly since “Z” was released in October 2005 (including a stint opening for Pearl Jam), Louisville's My Morning Jacket just played the last shows of two short tours that followed the release of their live epic “Okonokos.”
To mark this moment, two dedicated fans from Nebraska got stuck in the ice and missed Friday night but finally made it Saturday for their first Jacket show. Traveling devotees flew in from around the country, including one woman from Los Angeles who came via the band's last show in Salt Lake City—she'd taken time off work to follow them since the legendary New Year's Eve shows at San Francisco's Fillmore. One woman from Japan currently living in Colorado will see her first show since the band played Tokyo.
While I am generally skeptical of competition and comparisons and generalizations and platitudes, I am about to lay it all down plain and simple. And while I hate to break it to the fans of other bands, I have seen the future of rock and roll, and its name is My Morning Jacket, as the two-night stand in Denver shared with the fans and confirmed with the universe some otherworldly shape-shifting ecstasy. As great students of rock themselves, the Jacket channels their classic influences in a spiritual, non-derivative way. They are rock stars in terms of theatrics, but not pretension or ego. We can hear the echoes of Radiohead, Neil Young, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and so many more.
On stage in strange costumes, Jim James holds court like a science-fiction action-figure protagonist carrying his band of brothers into ever more majestic and mystic moments of pure sonic poetry. This is what rock and roll was supposed to be in their bedrooms when they were 14 and has been engraved on the souls of teenage air-guitarists everywhere. No wonder Cameron Crowe put them in a movie playing “Freebird.” It’s because Crowe appreciates the mix tape of the soul like few others in Hollywood, as evidenced by the story of “Almost Famous” and the cheesy but priceless ending of “Elizabethtown.”
To experience all of it in such intimacy two nights in a row is profound. To tell of its cinematic and religious qualities is point others to the sounds. But of course this means that the career should take these guys to the next level next time—which means I must cherish this closeness and ineffable camaraderie now. Someday they may hold stadiums rapt, and I can only pray they keep the same playful seriousness in tact. Meanwhile, mainstream radio ignores them, so we know it is through the albums and the shows, the internet and places like the theatrical screenings of “Okonokos” that we can gather like a tribe, each of us wearing the morning jacket of his or her choice.
Photo courtesy of Julio Enriquez for cause=time.
And frankly, and honestly, and I can only say this heartfully after seeing MMJ in Denver for two nights, I've rarely seen a band put on a live show like the Jacket. Best live band on the planet right now. Best old school rock band of our time. Great by any standards. Big words, yes, and deserving of them this band is.
Wildly, they're still relatively underground. I still can't get over how cozy the venues they sell out are. With five albums behind them, these late twenty-something’s are the music fringe's best kept secret, even after owning a share of what the American rock festival means from Coachella to Bonnaroo to Lollapalooza and many of the smaller festivals and on and on.
Having seen this ferocious five-piece at Bonnaroo and the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, I am utterly shocked by both the small size of the Ogden, the lack of a line at doors, and the sparse crowd so close to curtain. Having played to only a handful of folks Friday, opening act Elvis Perkins in Dearland went on late Saturday.
Listing their influences online as “the sun, wind, rain, fire, the sea, gravity, stars, death, the night, Time, the planets, their moons and ours,” Elvis Perkins in Dearland speak in the pure language of what's come to be known as alt-folk or freak folk (and reminding me of Dylan, Nick Drake, Alexi Murdoch, and Devandra Banhart.) Another critic compared 'em to John Lennon and the Band; either way, this group grooves with traditional instruments like acoustic guitar, harmonica, stand-up bass, harmonium, trombone, and an antique marching-band bass drum. Their sets were filled with carnival-esque sweetness, surreal lyrics, and an obvious admiration for the headliners. After two memorably puckish sets, I plan to make myself much more familiar with their stuff before seeing them again in two months. With only two weeks off, this group will tour all winter and into spring. Their next show is in Dublin.
The break between bands passed quickly both nights—just enough time to hit the bathroom and the bar and get back to where your spot was being saved for lights down and Jacket up at 9:30pm sharp. “One Big Holiday” proved the perfect opener Friday, and we were off. (The same song reappeared the second night toward the end of the first set, where it practically took the roof off the Ogden.)
The shows had many breathtaking, mind-stretching moments. When James's pipes climbed to the high, high notes at the end of “Wordless Chorus,” the “weeowoohwah” or whatever-it-is-so-angelic-and-eerie-that he does struck itself inside my soul. He finds a similar synthesis of soul-soothing and spirit-shocking inside “It Beats for You” (which was the second night opener, casting a sacred and hair-raising spell on the whole place).
Photo courtesy of Julio Enriquez for cause=time.
Just as James finds such elusive epiphanies with his vocal yoga, the band bends its own massive metaphors when channeling the classic-rock gods—as in the spacier, harder, longer, let's-not-call-them-jam-band-moments of tracks like “Lay Low,” “Run Thru,” “Steam Engine,” and “Mahgeetah.”
The crossover appeal to jam band fans everywhere should not be understated, but it should not be misrepresented or misinterpreted either. The Jacket groks the integrity of the song and gives its live rendition the space to breathe, but not the space to grow like mold into boring, self-referential, cock-rocking whateverland. They take us to the outer galaxies and back, sure. Yes, they can sustain a musical thought for more than ten minutes, and they can get tweaky and freaky and geeky in the most gifted manner. But they return to rock's mission statement in a way that's both refreshing and chilling, understanding a vocation to write and perform rock songs—not to randomly splash sounds on the aural canvas.
In one of his few moments of speechifying between songs on Friday, James referred directly to the death-defying drives, of trusting the tour bus driver to face the snow drifts safely. He also mentioned flu in the whole crew, suggesting that no one kiss the band-members tonight. When we think about the first night's 115-minute set in the context of how utterly whipped they all appeared, we can understand how heroic they still are in spite of it, giving 200% for the fans who risked as much just getting there, too. But Saturday, the band seemed born again, breathing fire into a breathtaking show that lasted until midnight without much of a break. The “encore” was really just a second set, clocking in at some 55 minutes.
Such over-the-top energy from a band that only 24 hours earlier had seemed just a little ragged was revelatory and refreshing. Who plays at least two hours or more every night? Who switches the set list every night? Over the course of this last mini-tour, some nights were mirrors, but at least one song would inevitably change. In Denver, we got treated to two completely changed shows as delicately dissimilar chapters forming a complete rock and roll masterpiece.
Every aspect of these gigs just felt like family, with all the fans up front forming a reflection of the bands loving, laughing, prankish camaraderie—theirs evidenced by Patrick Hallahan and Bo Koster playfully attacking each other like adolescents in a locker room, tossing towels and playing with toy guns.
Another family member of the band is called reverb—best defined as “the acoustic environment that surrounds a sound.” One very cold Colorado Friday night, the Ogden Theatre patrons were soaked in sacred reverb and smoked-out by second-hand reefer fumes. Throughout both shows, I could lose the bone-cold chills and loosen my scarf and feel the heat of: Carl Broemel and James's dueling guitars; Hallahan 's cymbal-riffs rocketing through my head; Two-Tone Tommy's bass bad-assedly thumping my third-eye; and Koster's bopping keyboard cool keeping it soulful and real.
Rock and roll wizards each of them, the Jacket have set a new standard for nailing each song as if the earth depended on it and playing each show as if it were their last. Other bands, please take some notes. MMJ has something so sincere to offer, frothing with showmanship but not showing off. I love how tight and completely communal the shows are now, but I imagine bigger things for these deserving guys. It's not a secret I can keep. If you love rock and roll and everything you thought it had lost through 30 years of shitty sell-out commercialism, go see the Jacket. Their next gig is at the Langerado Festival in Florida in March, and we'll all be surprised if they don't show up at Bonnaroo again.
Stay tuned.
For more information on My Morning Jacket, please visit the official website and MySpace page. “Okonokos” was released on ATO Records in September, and “Okonokos: The Concert” was released October 31st.
Last edited:
