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My Morning Jacket - Z

Label: RCA

If you like: Neil Young filtered through Air with a nod to Curtis Mayfield

Song to download: "Dondante"

3½ Stars

My Morning Jacket, which hails from Kentucky, has been becoming more distinctive with each album. It Still Moves, released in 2003, was a fine work that pushed the band to a fresh musical and commercial pinnacle - but it pales next to the strides found on Z, the band's new album and a work that hovers close to the realm of reinvention.

The rootsy foundation of the band's previous work has largely been supplanted by a soulful undercurrent that helps atmospheric arrangements revive the fading pulse of musical invention. Producer John Leckie trims fat, balancing the band's over-the-top fondness for reverb and adding fresh dynamic power to create solid songs that are decidedly more adventurous. The band can still crank the guitars - "Lay Low" is a sassy miasmic boogie of seismic proportion. But most of the album, despite the occasional galvanizing guitar upheaval, is given to Leckie and singer-songwriter Jim James' skills as dream weavers.

Wistful melodies enchant, and James' pining falsetto adds an evocative element of innocence to spatial arrangements, filled with loops, riffs and pulsing beats, that act as a musical manifesto for a new kind of revolution - stormy hymns to an infinite silence of escalating proportions.

James deals in cosmic currency, reshaping issues of spirituality, romance, carnality and disenfranchisement as they emerge, lending an air of hope while making exotic creativity sound like life in a funhouse.

At once fresh and timeless, Z is many things, most good, but it never, ever slips into zzzzzz.

- Ed Bumgardner, relish staff writer