Eye Weekly

[LaurieBlue]

http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_10.13.05/music/ondisc.html

MY MORNING JACKET
 
Z ATO/SonyBMG

What's with southern-rock bands these days? It's like they don't want to be southern: first Kings of Leon get designer haircuts, then Kentucky barn-burners My Morning Jacket make a reggae album. Well, that's only half true of Z: co-produced by Britpop architect John Leckie, it relocates MMJ's flying-V/flying hair hysterics into more unusual, expansive environs -- and that includes some surprisingly successful flirtations with dub sonics. Frontman Jim James' siren of a voice roams and wanders like a curious child, exploring each new territory -- Spiritualized hypno-builds on "Gideon," foreboding Radiohead-y atmospherics on "It Beats 4 U," aquatic funk on "Wordless Chorus" -- with equal glee and abandon, even if the path eventually leads to somewhere darker than expected: "Off the Record" may begin as a joyous reggafied jaunt, but it intensifies into a monstrous riff riot that dissolves into a ghostly, drum-machined dreamscape. The free-ridin' "What a Wonderful Man" and "Lay Low" -- whose awesome duelling geetar-solo climax does anything but -- return us to familiar scenes of open-top Camaros and drive-in screenings of Dazed and Confused, but on Z, they exist only as fleeting, nostalgic glimpses of a world that My Morning Jacket has moved far beyond. STUART BERMAN

My Morning Jacket play The Guvernment (132 Queens Quay E) Oct 19.