Any others fans out there? I've been into them since about, ooh... '04? And for about every year since then they've been tipped to go overground but it looks like the time has passed. Y'see, MMJ are ridiculously unclassifiable. Just when you think you've got them pegged, mastermind Jim James get bored and moves onto something else.
Look at him. He's a southern rocker, right? The band even played a Skynyrd tribute band in a hilarious scene in Cameron Crowe's 'Elizabethtown'. Unfortunately for his band's commercial prospects, Mr James' love of boogie rock and country exists alongside a love of bands as disparate as Black Sabbath, Funkadelic, Radiohead and, umm, old Disney themes. He really likes old Disney songs. 'When You Wish Upon a Star'. That kind of thing. And as far as I'm aware, MMJ are the only professional recording act to have covered 'Freebird', 'Take My Breath Away' by Berlin and 'West End Girls' by the Pet Shop Boys. I mean, there's not giving a fuck and then there's covering 'Take My Breath Away' because you have no qualms whatsoever about admitting it's got a great tune.
Very modern, no? I mean, we all love everything nowadays. If there's a genre we can't fake at least a passing knowledge of on the internet we'll have it downloaded and dissimilated by the morning. Well, apparently not, if reactions to the new MMJ album are anything to go by. The band who were hailed as the last great white hope a few years ago upon the release of 'Z' (it was hailed as their 'The Bends' and even shared a producer in John Leckie) are now being savaged by critics and fans alike for embracing 'black' sounds on their new record. Personally, I don't see it as a huge deal, but then I'm not a neurotic indie kid with a blog (yet). Have a listen for yourself.
Here's a somewhat rough clip of MMJ a few years ago in full-on Neil Young mode.
And here's the demented offspring of Prince, Britney, Bobby Brown and Muse that is 'Highly Suspicious' from the new album:
A fucking JAM, I'm sure you'll agree. The album also takes in fairly straight country-rock and folk, a few rockers and a couple of gloriously gloopy ballads that sound like they came off of AM radio in the late 70's. It's possibly a Carpenters thing. Most fans seem to be fine with these parts of the album, but the Prince-sings-OK-Computer stylings of 'Evil Urges' and the Kraftwerk/Abba motifs adorning 'Touch Me I'm Going to Scream (part 2)' ruffled more feathers than I thought possible. Apparently it's okay when MMJ sound like The Who on 'Gideon'
or Mercury Rev or whoever on their earlier dreamier, psych-folk material, but not when they let even a little bit of the funk in to shake up their sound. So apparently we modern music types aren't as eclectic and pancultural as I thought. If anything, MMJ are a throwback to an earlier time, when an album didn't mean 12 tracks of increasingly derivative ultra-compressed homogeneity, when even a ridiculously huge band like, say, The Beatles would think nothing of throwing a track comprised solely of vocal and traditional Indian instruments on an album that also contained a backwards tape loop trance-inducing headfuck of a mantra (yeah, I've been listening to 'Revolver', so sue me), when even a band as comparatively orthodox as the Rolling Stones could start an album with the very definition of dirt and sleaze that is 'Gimme Shelter', detour into pure country midway through and then end with the church choir and french horn-assisted ballad detailing the ravages of heroin on a formerly tight social circle we know as 'You Can't Always Get What You Want'. And that's just the
commercial stuff from that period of rock and roll.
Something sure did get lost when the big money came in.
Have a listen to My Morning Jacket (probably starting with 'Z' or the superb double live album 'Okonokos'). They rock. Except when they don't. And that rocks too.
(Something of an amusing postscript; flicking through the monthly music mags earlier, I was struck not just by how little attention is being paid to 'Evil Urges' compared to the 'Album of the Month!' double-page spreads that 'Z' received, but by how much coverage is being afforded to and hype built up around bands like Fleet Foxes and Band of Horses, reverb-heavy neo-folk of the sort that My Morning Jacket
used to specialise in before they expanded their horizons, bands happily providing disgruntled MMJ fans with 'more of the same'. It's a strange world.)
