The Daily Utah Chronicle - !!

[LaurieBlue]

The Daily Utah Chronicle - A & E
Issue: 10/11/05

http://www.dailyutahchronicle.com/media/paper244/news/2005/10/11/AE/Mapping.Out.A.New.Geography.Of.Sound.My.Morning.Jacket.Plays.Aural.Cartographer-1016539.shtml?page=1
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Mapping out a new geography of sound: My Morning Jacket plays aural cartographer on the impeccable Z
By Eryn Green

My Morning Jacket

Z

ATO Records

Five out of five stars

If the whole rock 'n' roll thing doesn't pan out for the members of My Morning Jacket, natives of Louisville, Ky., they can always fall back on careers as aural cartographers.

However, if My Morning Jacket's newest release, Z, is any indicator, front man Jim James and Co. ought not to have any worry about their current day job faltering any time soon-this is one of the finest records released in the past five years.

Still, mapmaking (of sorts) is an option for My Morning Jacket. It's something that great rock 'n' roll artists have been doing for ages: Using music to explore uncharted, or previously unknown, territory, both literally and figuratively.

With The Beatles, you hear London and its surrounding industrial grit in even the softest songs (e.g., "Hey Jude's" desire for redemption is nothing if not reminiscent of the Fab Four's latent desire to escape and redeem in the face of a confining factory youth). With Lynyrd Skynyrd, every discordant note calls to mind the convoluted, proud and rebellious history of the South. Similarly, Bob Dylan-in his New York days-struck every guitar string with lovesick, subterranean Soho blues, revisiting his surroundings in his music time and time again.

As did the greats before them, My Morning Jacket, in Z, has a way of inventing a sound that is at once innovative and dynamic, but which also harkens back to its maker's past. In this way, My Morning Jacket shows how music can be a means of exploring geography-an exercise in the sonic naming of a place.

The band started as a neo-hippy bluegrass outfit, morphed into indie-prog jam conglomerate (complete with nine-minute songs) and has now, on Z, honed its skills and morphed into a kind of accessible, flickering Southern experimental group with real pop sensibilities.

For fans who have never been to Louisville, My Morning Jacket's new record acts as a roadmap to a state (and a state of mind), painting a striking picture of the band's roots by way of a mercurial, ever-changing landscape of stark industrial expanses and intimate moments of self-righteous glory.

Z maintains its internal logic by exploring all the formative nooks and crannies that made My Morning Jacket the band it has become. There are throwbacks to the band's previous incarnations (including the excellent '70s rock opus "Lay Low," a piece of harmonic mastery), and in this way, Z works as a compass for listeners keen enough to care about a locale, sound and band they may not have previously found compelling.

Z is the closest thing to a genre-busting, sensibility-hopping Radiohead-caliber record that America has had in years. The album leaps and bounds across boundaries of form and tone. On the album's opener, James' falsetto howl sounds like a mix of Thom York and vintage Michael Jackson, while on the album closer, "Dondante," he sounds like a whiskey-soaked bar rag and a pack of cigarettes.

As Z shifts, it leaves in its wake the rubble of all kinds of accepted standards in music. Z moves from synth-heavy opera on its early cuts to substantial, twangy Southern-fried pseudo-psych exploration on its latter.

The album's title, Z, works as an accurate indicator of the record's project: The last letter of the alphabet, 'Z' implies a long and storied lineage of predecessors, while at the same time pointing out that the album exists at the end of a chain in new, groundbreaking territory.

The record appeals to the storied narrative of performers who helped make My Morning Jacket the important musical outfit it is: There is some Skynyrd, some Neil Young and some Rolling Stones-particularly on blues-ier cuts, such as the album's penultimate track, "Knot Comes Loose," intermingled with a decidedly contemporary tone. Bands such as Radiohead and Bright Eyes have had a heavy influence on the experimental and ambitious nature of Z just as much as any classical musician has.

Particular innovation can be found on the album's opening song (and statement of purpose), "Wordless Chorus."

On the opening track James sings, "So much going on these days/ Forget about instinct, that's not what pays/ Pleasure up and down my smile/...Tell me spirit/ What's not been done?/ I'll rush out and do it/ Or are we doing it now."

Is My Morning Jacket doing it now? Absolutely.

e.green@chronicle.utah.edu

[tdan]

I am a mapmaker by trade and have loved music my entire life.  I am fascinated by the connections between music and geography but I have to question the inspiration of the use of that connection by the author of this review.  While I think that the connection is real, it has most recently gained much attention via 'Elizabethtown' and Cameron Crowe's use of the Music Map. As I was reading the review all I could find myself thinking was whether the author would have made these same observations a month or two back.