Dirt - Top CD of 2005

[LaurieBlue]

http://boulderdirt.com/columns/article.cfm/4939

Grierson: Getting high with My Morning Jacket
By Tim Grierson | Wednesday November 16, 2005
 

We're nearing the end of 2005, and the best-of-the-year lists will soon be on their way. Keeping up with CDs is just about an impossible undertaking, but I try to rev it up around Thanksgiving so that I can make sure I've perused any and all acclaimed records I may have missed.

The first three albums on this list have gotten profuse praise. But only one of them is really worth jumping up and down in your apartment for.


My Morning Jacket, "Z" (ATO/RCA)

Wilco is a talented American band burdened with Jeff Tweedy's pretensions to turn his songwriting experiments into Important Artistic Mutterings. My Morning Jacket is a talented American band unburdened by Jim James's desire to shed his jam-band aspirations and fly off into the mystic.

Like the Band before them, they hone their sound until it achieves total warmth - it's not a mission but a community they're after. (One of the best songs gives thanks to a singer who helped James through a tough day; can't get much generous and kind-hearted than that.)

In the past, James wallowed in a luxurious pool of his own self-pity, but here he's getting cryptic, funny, transcendental. It's a good bet that pot won't enhance any of this very much at all.

[dragonboy]

Wilco is a talented American band burdened with Jeff Tweedy's pretensions to turn his songwriting experiments into Important Artistic Mutterings. My Morning Jacket is a talented American band unburdened by Jim James's desire to shed his jam-band aspirations and fly off into the mystic.

I love that paragraph!  ;D

[aMillionDreams]

this is one of the better write-ups I've read.  It's as if this guy actually knows what he is talking about.  Weird.

[dragonboy]

this is one of the better write-ups I've read.  It's as if this guy actually knows what he is talking about.  Weird.

Quite right, that's a rare thing when it comes to journalists & MMJ's music!

[Easy Morning Rebel]

that's a really good review.