Well, this is a first. Never have I had to Google the name of a band’s new record, just to make sure I’ve been given the right CD. It’s not that some of the tracks on My Morning Jacket’s fifth album merely sound like a change of direction for the Louiseville five piece, it’s rather that they sound so darn bad.
Looking down at the notes I made while listening to ‘Evil Urges’, “dull” and “boring” crop up with great frequency and “pompous” rears its ugly head at least twice. Not good.
In fact, pomposity relates to the very first track, which starts off well enough, aping the epic build up of The Secret Machines’ opener to ‘Now Here is Nowhere’, but in MMJ’s hands songs that start off interesting seem to have an innate ability to go awry. Or just, er, funky.
Yes, singer Jim James has taken it upon himself to ditch the reverb-heavy sound of his vocal efforts on earlier albums and go falsetto. Like Beck. Or Prince. Except, he’s neither, and the music being played behind him has little of the verve or intuition that seeps out of the aforementioned funksters’ work. Just listen to ‘Highly Suspicious’. Or rather, don’t.
Again, ‘Touch Me I’m Going to Scream’ promises great things but gives way to Delays style vocals and some really pitiful lyrics; the kind of sub-Gallagher nonsense where you can guess exactly what’s coming next. “Remember when you were seventeen / You was going crazy, you know what I mean” is perhaps James’ choicest morsel during ‘Two Halves’.
Not even the lap steels and strings can save the latter half of the record. There’s empty talk of our “big, big world” where you can “get what you want” in the rockier ‘Aluminum Park’, while collectively the band sound as bored as I was by the end of Remnants.
Some possible respite comes from the quietest track on the album, ‘Librarian’, but the conceit of watching a bookworm through stacks of shelves (yep, she even wears glasses) and opining how the “interweb” has diminished library attendance, keeps what could have been a lovely song – in the same vein as ‘Steam Engine’ on the far superior ‘It Still Moves’ – from truly blossoming.
Ultimately it’s a shame that MMJ have seemingly decided to morph into a pastiche of a 70s soul band and allow James to eunuch his way around most of this record. Other than his misplaced fascination with AOR bands there aren’t any particularly creative urges here. Just a lot of evil.
Released 09/06/08 on Rough Trade
