"I'm getting so tired of trying to always be nice," Jim James laments on "Big Decisions", the first single from My Morning Jacket's seventh LP The Waterfall. It's a surprising line from James, a guy responsible for a nearly weeklong music festival in Mexico named One Big Holiday. If there was a mean bone in his body, we haven't seen it before—My Morning Jacket lyrics are mostly praise and posi-vibes, feeling wonderful about a wonderful higher power for giving wonderful men the most wonderful voices. On "Big Decisions", James pushes back on the weight of a lopsided relationship, and the mundane, everyday struggle is charged with everything that has made My Morning Jacket one of the most likeable major American rock bands of the 21st century—reverberating Flying V guitars, James’ expansive rebel yell, explosive harmonies and reverb capable of canvassing the entirety of Manchester, Tenn. and beyond. Even if James is reasserting himself in an atypically selfish way, it sounds like a triumph big enough for everyone to share.
Since My Morning Jacket abandoned the grain silo on their 2005 masterwork, their albums have followed a similar format: reverb or no reverb, James’ saintly voice can redeem anything, so no song idea was too strange as long as it could still work at Bonnaroo. On that level, The Waterfall does little you haven’t already heard from My Morning Jacket; they just regain the quality control that abandoned them on Evil Urges and ditch the damage control that pervaded Circuital. "Believe (Nobody Knows)" feels precision-engineered for the express purpose of opening My Morning Jacket's live show for the next two years: a big, windmilled chord anticipates every low-register repetition of the title in the prechorus, preparing for when James lets the final "BELIIIIIIIIIEVE" rip an octave higher. And that’s where the Klieg lights inevitably hit, as does the same recognizable liftoff from "Wordless Chorus" and "Mahgeetah", a feeling that the possibilities of life itself are limitless, not just the range of My Morning Jacket. You can’t fake something like "Believe (Nobody Knows)" if you haven’t played in front of tens of thousands of festival goers.
Then again, few found fault with the first ten minutes of Evil Urges and Circuital; the measure of a My Morning Jacket album is their success at doing what’s not expected of them. Compared to "Highly Suspicious" or "Holdin’ on to Black Metal", the risks here are more manageable, the results far more successful: there’s "Compound Fracture", which tails off into a coda of keyboard flutter and falsetto after flaunting Chvrches electronic stomp and Some Girls strut. "Get the Point" delivers James’ most biting lyrics to date within a McCartney-esque acoustic ditty ("I'm trying to tell you plainly how I'm feeling day to day/ And I'm so sorry now that you ain't feeling the same way"). The electronic cut-and-paste of "Spring (Among the Living)" is a sleek, modernist iPad compared to "Cobra"’s bulky, retro ENIAC, while Eastern modes poking through "Like a River" and "Tropics (Erase Traces)" scent the chillout tent with lavender incense rather than the usual weed smoke. It reaffirms that MMJ are one of the most exciting American rock bands going when they’re at their most generous, curious and restless, as they are here.
But "Big Decisions" puts the focus squarely on a new place for an MMJ record: the lyrics. The song, and the album as a whole, gives Jim James The Person center stage for what feels like the first time, instead of just The Voice of Jim James. As on record, James has been open with the big picture while skimping on the details—after 15 or so years of giving his all on stage, he’s left just as much off it, and here he is at 37, nearly crippled by workplace injuries, spent from partying and wondering aloud in Rolling Stone, "what have I done wrong in every relationship I've been in until now?"
There are legitimate personal stakes here and The Waterfall allows for James to express some uncharacteristic negativity without dwelling on it. For a record of spiritual and romantic reckoning, it’s remarkably level-headed and pragmatic. James sweetly coos over Chi-Lites psych-soul, "It’s a thin line/ Between love and wasting my time", clearly assessing a broken situation to which he mends on "Get the Point": "Daydreaming of leaving/ I only had to do it." He wishes his ex the best of luck and then immediately celebrates the exhilarating, frightening rush of single living on "Spring (Among the Living)"—during each rambling guitar solo, you can picture James right-swiping to his heart’s content.
For many, Jim James is basically synonymous with My Morning Jacket, so it’s justifiable to find parallels in the rejuvenation of each—My Morning Jacket has another album on the way some time next year. It’s welcome news for the band's fans, but maybe a bit disappointing considering how a predetermined release schedule usually results in two very good albums in place of one great one, and The Waterfall gets close to greatness. With a little troubleshooting, it might have matched At Dawn's cohesion or Z's dazzling diversity: The misty-eyed reflection of "Only Memories Remain" cycles back to a breakup narrative on Side B that otherwise feels like it was put on shuffle, and The Waterfall stalls the most during the usually incendiary guitar workouts. But this is Jim James accepting where he and My Morning Jacket are at the moment: a bit older, a bit broken, more skeptical but very much among the living.
