ZReview - Courier-Journal - Louisville

[LaurieBlue]

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051008/SCENE04/51007015/1011
Courier-Journal - Louisville, Kentucky

Saturday, October 8, 2005

Album Reviews
My Morning Jacket delivers
Band charts new territory, defies categorization

By Jeffrey Lee Puckett
jpuckett@courier-journal.com
Courier-Journal Critic

"Z" is the record that My Morning Jacket had to make sooner or later, one that pulverizes the easy stereotypes that have grown around the band over the last few years. Only the laziest of music fans or writers could now insist on describing the Louisville band as hillbillies, long-haired Southern rockers or indie-Skynyrds.

That stuff has always been overblown, anyway. Just because a band is committed to rock 'n' roll, comes from Kentucky and happens to sport a mess of hair doesn't make the band members Southern rockers. That's just crazy — almost as crazy as a bubblegum surf-pop reggae sing-along that suddenly deconstructs into a space-blues jam with echoes of Pink Floyd's "Meddle."

That would be "Off the Record," a highlight of "Z" and one of the songs that clearly point the way to a future for MMJ where rules don't apply and expectations are exposed as pointless. It's an exciting, vibrant record that demands and rewards attention.

"Z" isn't a complete departure, but a significant one. The pop quotient has gone up wildly on songs such as "Wordless Chorus," but it's the kind of catchy you don't see coming — maybe Sly Stone meets the Bee Gees. Songs come at you from all directions, and there are moments of genuine oddness. "What a Wonderful Man," for example, sounds like an excerpt from a rock opera. It's the album's strangest song — until you get to "Into the Woods," the aural equivalent of a Tim Burton stop-motion dreamscape.

It's interesting that "Into the Woods" is followed by a trio of almost vintage MMJ songs, as if the band is extending a helping hand to the lost or confused. "Anytime," "Lay Low" and "Knot Comes Loose" all play upon the band's classic strengths, with "Lay Low" coming off as a natural successor to epics such as "Run Thru" and "One Big Holiday" — it'll be huge in concert.

The album then closes with "Dondante," perhaps the perfect marriage of MMJ old and new. It's a spiritual cousin to Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer," which is territory the band has visited before, but it's lighter, weirder and less bound by gravity. That combination of familiarity and wicked surprise is at the heart of "Z," which unlocks a host of doors for Louisville's finest band.

Jeffrey Lee Puckett is SCENE's pop music editor and oversees this page.

[primushead]

Great article.  Their description of "Dondante" is magnificant.