more October news and reviews

[thebigbang]

Southern Rock Reviled
My Morning Jacket is a lot of things, but Southern rock isn't one of them.
BY PATRICK WENSINK
http://www.wweek.com/flatfiles/Music4385.lasso

The members of My Morning Jacket know as well as any other recording artists in the country that comparisons are inescapable. Almost every time a journalist opened his mouth, or a critic touched her pen to paper after listening to the group's 1999 debut, the associations flowed: That lead singer sure sounds like Neil Young...this is a jam band for indie kids...these guys are leaders in the Southern rock revival.
The group's latest, It Still Moves (RCA), solidifies most of these comparisons. People say Jim James sounds like Young, and here he breaks your heart, like Young at his best, with every word he utters. Call 'em a jam band, and they sign with Dave Matthews' ATO Records. Critics can't help but point out the Kentucky band's Southern roots--well, here come barn-dance shuffles like "Easy Mornin' Rebel." Just don't you dare call these boys "Southern rock."

"People slap 'Southern rock' on us. We are from the South, but I don't feel that we are a Southern rock band," says guitarist Johnny Quaid. "[Our songs have] so many influences. Some have a reggae feel; 'Run Thru' has a Black Sabbath feel to it. Southern rock kind of turns us off."

The band has managed to produce a kind of impressionist Americana on its latest. You hear what you want to hear from the layers of country, psych and Southern swagger. While listening to the album, one person might hear a Nashville twang, while another hears "Iron Man." Its psychedelic leanings might seem like British Invasion to a different set of ears. Overall, It Still Moves is a batter of tragic grace, thick harmony and rock that takes a cue from the rugged country soul of the Outlaws.

Even with such a broad musical palette, My Morning Jacket still can't shake its Southern image. They still have to contend with the idea that they are a bunch of barefoot, bearded country bumpkins.

"I think that happens a little bit. Especially overseas," says Quaid. "It's not completely true. We're somewhat educated and most of the time wear shoes. We're pretty civilized, actually."

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Rock lets loose its Southern soul

By GARY MULLINAX
09/28/2003
http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/life/2003/09/28rockletslooseit.html

Tired of slick Top 40 songs by little girls, electronica by guys twisting knobs in their parents' basement, and heavy metal by bands that have forgotten about the blues?

A lot of people are.

That helps explain why one of the hottest trends in pop music these days features:

• Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill, three sons of a Pentacostal preacher with names that could have come from the dark side of a William Faulkner novel.

• A band whose lead singer takes the stage barefoot and covers his face with his mat of long hair.

• A group that sings about burying a guy who wants to repossess the farm "in the old sinkhole" and "purdy little girls" who want to join them in the van.

All of that plus sweat, swagger and bluesy guitar licks.

Yes, Southern rock is coming back.

It joins raw garage rock and earnest singer-songwriters as a salt-of-the-earth alternative to music that has lost its heart.

Drive-by Truckers, the group with the song about the sinkhole, has a tribute album to Lynyrd Skynyrd to its credit, though so far the Alabama band has clicked more with critics than with the masses.

My Morning Jacket, the Kentucky band with the barefoot singer, is bidding to make a serious move from critics' darlings to critics' darlings with widespread commercial success.

Kings of Leon, the band with those Followill brothers, is an authentic part of the hipster-approved garage-band movement. The group from Tennessee is sometimes known as the Southern Strokes.

Other Southern groups to be reckoned with include the North Mississippi All-Stars, the Derek Trucks Band, Los Lonely Boys and the Robert Randolph Family Band, which is actually from New Jersey but wouldn't exist without the influence of Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Allman Brothers.

There's even a Southern white boy named Bubba Sparxxx who raps to blues harmonica and mountain music and embraces his hardscrabble roots in Georgia the way gangsta rappers embrace the 'hood.

Even those high-crowned, mesh trucker hats associated with the South are making a comeback.

It's been a long time since Southern rock has been such a major player. The Allmans made it important in the early 1970s. Lynyrd Skynyrd filled a lot of ears later in the decade, as did similar but lesser bands like The Outlaws and .38 Special.

But by the end of the decade it could feel like a guilty pleasure to enjoy a sound that had come to seem kind of Neanderthal. Since then, Southern rock has been a favorite of aging hippies and bikers, but it has mostly been stuck in a ghetto all its own.

Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers never heard Lynyrd Skynyrd when he was young. "I grew up more being into punk rock," he told an interviewer. But in his early 30s, after the band moved to indie-rock center Athens, Ga., he began to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd and liked what he heard.

"Southern Rock Opera," released on an obscure label in 2001, was about a fictional band almost exactly like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the songs followed that band's three-guitar-boogie approach.

The Lost Highway label was interested enough to sign the Truckers for their next album. But when the band turned in the music it had not cloned Skynyrd, as the label seemed to expect. The Truckers bought it back and released the songs on the new "Decoration Day."

"Decoration Day" is Southern to the core but eclectic. There are boogie riffs, rootsy ballads, garage-like rave-ups. The lyrics are darker than Skynyrd's - almost pure Southern Gothic.

The Drive-by Truckers never seem to take their tongues all the way out of their cheeks, which doesn't make the lyrics hard to understand but might present a stumbling block to listeners craving authenticity.

Consider "Hell No I Ain't Happy" from "Decoration Day." Musically it's straight Skynyrd (almost too straight). Lyrically, the naked griping about life's many aggravations almost sounds like a parody - maybe the Southern rock version of Spinal Tap.

My Morning Jacket raises no doubts about its earnestness. The band members, in their mid-20s, are about a decade younger than the Drive-by Truckers and a little more starry-eyed.

The British press noticed My Morning Jacket first, as it did The Strokes and the Led Zeppelin-influenced White Stripes. But it emphasized the band's wild and wooly aspects and made sure to note booze references in the lyrics. The lads from Louisville, who take themselves fairly seriously, are getting a little tired of it.

"It's frustrating to work your ass off, and give up most human pleasures, and then have people think we're a big, drunken Southern rock band," leader Jim James told his hometown newspaper.

Musically, the band strays far from the Skynyrd template, though it does include some blues-rock licks and a taste of rockabilly. Mostly, though, the reverb-heavy songs have a grandeur that calls to mind Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev and Grandaddy, down to the Neil Young-like vocals.

As one of the Brits put it, the band has "created its own realm, one imbued with a childlike sense of wonder, big emotions and [a sound] resonant with old men's guitars."

The Kings of Leon also got their first raves in England. Critics praise the band for adding blues-rock to the stripped-down, melodic rock of The Strokes. You can hear some punk in there, too, and grooves that hold you tight.

The North Mississippi All-Stars - 20-something sons of noted Memphis producer Jim Dickinson - began their careers by updating the blues. But on their third album, "Polaris," the group expands into jazzy jam-band music, straight pop and other areas.

The North Mississippi All-Stars supported Robert Randolph on his 2001 album, "The Word," along with groove-jazz keyboardist John Medeski. Randolph was playing "sacred steel" gospel guitar in a New Jersey church before venturing into the pop market.

Randolph is not the only member of the new Southern rock scene who shows a penchant for Stevie Ray Vaughan. The Garza brothers - aka Texas' Los Lonely Boys - get Vaughan-like on their new self-titled album, which also owes a debt to Tex-Mex music.

Guitarist Derek Trucks has a stellar Southern rock pedigree. His uncle was an original member of the Allman Brothers and Derek plays in the Allmans' current lineup. But he gets very jazzy on his new album "Soul Serenade," demonstrating just what a talented Southern rocker can do when he decides to see where else the style can take him.

The new Bubba Sparxxx album, "Deliverance," takes the rapper a considerable distance from his debut two years ago. A video from that album showed him dressed in overalls and carrying two pigs.

It called to mind the way "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" turned mountain music into comedy even as it implied admiration for the style and probably helped create a climate where Southern rock could again flourish.

It's time for the laughter to stop (unless you're laughing with them and not at them). This stuff is the real deal.

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Malcolm Mayhew -  Star Telegram

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/entertainment/6866353.htm

My Morning Jacket, It Still Moves, RCA/ATO: Whenever an independent band signs to a major label, eyebrows go up and expectations go down. So many great indie-rock bands have signed to majors, then, in hopes of attaining popularity, tossed their left-of-center ideas for middle-of-the-road ones. The opposite has happened to this Kentucky quintet. Then result of the band's signing to Dave Matthews' division of RCA is its most affecting work yet. Steeped in the exquisitely bleak Americana of Neil Young and driven by the lonesome, Young-like murmurs of singer Jim James, It Still Moves paints images of open roads and closed hearts, life's endless possibilities and its inevitable endings. This record will warm your heart, then crush it.

A+

[wordawg]

Its all good!

Good interview in this weeks Kerrang.  New album was one of their albums of the month.

Onwards and upwards