John Bemis
Blogs Editor
@bemiscourant
The music of My Morning Jacket has always been a bit difficult to pin, but not in the sense that it is at all too dense to be classified. Rather, their consistency in separately exploring mellow psychedelia, cinematic drone-rock and James Taylor-esque folk makes it unfair to dub them under one of their labels as you may completely disregard the other.
These eclectic influences, molded through their straight-out-of-Frisco image has left them at a fortunate place in marketing; a band with a now matured creativity, instant pop sensibility, and raucous live shows to boot. So justifies their rapid rise to fame as the decade’s premier “true rock” band, as well as this album, which displays their stagnant musicality as seasoned through new credibility. It’s a wholly straightforward record; no leaps of faith, no journeys into something remotely differed. A fun listen regardless, but just basic enough to raise some eyebrows towards the band’s musical future.
As the group has become synonymous with frontman/Jesus lookalike/Dylan contemporary Jim James, so has the spotlight been placed upon him unabashedly. His voice soars on every track in roughly the same fashion as every other MMJ project, thankfully to the same enjoyable effect. It’s just as fun to see him stretch to a wordless Robert Plant-ic falsetto or dip to lower soothing tones, and, whatever the context, that reverb-soaked voice remains James’ essential contribution, a keystone in the band’s pop arsenal.
Lyrically, a My Morning Jacket record can usually only yield so much outside of James’ enigmatic guru-isms. The often sun-baked verses take a turn for occasional pessimism on Waterfall, but only to enhance the rebound. Explorations of heartbreak (‘Big Decisions’) and romantic disintegration (‘Compound Fracture’) are catalysts for subsequent freedoms and optimism (‘Believe’). The songwriting talents of MMJ mostly come in terms of writing catchy, relatable hooks on Waterfall. Rarely do these bars fall short on a solid track, but just as rarely do they break any new ground.
At this point, MMJ could not be in a better position. They’ve got rabid fans, hosted an annual self-hosted festival called One Big Holiday to extreme attendance, and a frontman with a personality now so clearly defined through his own works that it eclipses any attention paid to other band members, like a new and tripped-out Steven Tyler or Paul McCartney. The Waterfall is one of two records they will be releasing between now and 2017, and embarking on their current world tour will only beget a larger spotlight. The band is undoubtedly on a fast-track to stadium-rock stardom, and with that in mind, it makes total sense that they would release Waterfall, a record scant with fresh ideas but ripe with potential to find larger audiences.
Waterfall largely falls short, though, as you experience it through the lens of their prolific live shows; It’s best to imagine them playing the tracks at a Coachella or Governors Ball, listening for the moments where colored lights flare and furious applause is met by audience entrancement. At their best, these tracks could provide danceable set-fillers, but not a balls-to-the-wall opener or monumental encore.
James described the recording of the album at North Carolina’s Stinson Beach as “being shoved up at the end of nature, on another planet, in a different galaxy”, and it would be likely to assume that paired with the LSD-saturated album art (and the 4+ years it took to make the record), The Waterfall may yield something colorful and sensorily intense on the scale of their performances. Those resulting recording sessions, though, have provided a much more compressed sound; any vast, booming echo or soundscape seems the result of production tricks, not of performance.
Rather than that blood-pumping, mind-altering listen that they are capable of, My Morning Jacket have only delivered a well executed pop record. Ambitions in more daring realms of spacious alt-rock (take their first record ‘The Tennessee Fire’, for example) take side-stage to the idea of over-polished beech music. Not to suggest that the album isn’t enjoyable for what it is, but it’s so beyond evident that the band is underplaying their true creativity. It was anticipatable move, though, coming from a band that has achieved enough success to warrant something so average.
As listeners, I think this record gives us reason to consider the band at a crossroads; they could climb towards the potential glamor and “sell out”, fully abandoning their former creative mystique, or dive head first into their own ‘Dark Side’ and cement their own legacy as pioneers of psych-folk-whatever. Waterfall doesn’t necessarily allude to their next movement, but is vanilla enough to raise exciting questions of whether they will proceed as wearisome or a well-aged creative institution.
