If you're a My Morning Jacket fan, you likely know that the band have lots of unreleased material, old tapes, and reel-to-reels scattered around the silo propped against rusting farm equipment and crusted with the hardened wax of a thousand candles. And you probably figured out that unreleased material sounded rough and raw, all those songs saturated in reverb and tape hiss. And you knew scattered among that scattered archive-- long stepped over, or used as coasters for countless beers, or as ashtrays, or piled 10 high for footprops-- there were bound to be a few gems. You were, more or less, right all along, as these two mini-biographies from the band's original label, Darla Records, attest; both are subtitled "early recordings, b-sides, covers, y mas" (that's if I'm reading the scribbles along the spines correctly), which is an adequate product description, albeit one that omits a few live versions, several alternate takes, some half-assed doodles, tape experiments, and distractions on a bored Sunday afternoon.
Most of these songs, as you could probably guess, feature just Jim James, the voice of My Morning Jacket, either strumming a guitar or playing rudimentary drum rhythms. He ostensibly compiled these tracks for Darla and divided them onto two separate disks. The first, Chapter 1: The Sandworm Cometh, almost has the easy flow of a proper album, beginning with the relatively polished "Weeks Go By Like Days", a full-band track from the Darla 100 comp and ending with a faithful cover of Elton John's "Rocket Man", which is particularly affecting here because James sounds like he's singing from the void of outer space.
In between those two stellar tracks are alternate takes of "They Ran" and "Evelyn Is Not Real", which would end up My Morning Jacket's debut, The Tennessee Fire, with better arrangements; strong rarities like "I Just Wanted to Be Your Friend"; some strange, short doodles ("What Will I Do?" and "Isobella With the White Umbrella"); a fuzzed-out version of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit"; and, best of all, a ragged rendition of Santo & Johnny's "Sleepwalk" that leads into a live, slowed-down version of the Tennessee Fire track "Olde Sept. Blues". Surprisingly, the collection holds together remarkably well as you glimpse the band's creative process through its discarded recordings.
Chapter 2: Learning is even more scattershot, both in its songs and in its tracklist. That subtitle is very likely a disclaimer, a tongue-in-cheek caveat to fans who might otherwise expect too much. The demo versions of album tracks like "Just One Thing" and "Death Is the Easy Way" anchor this volume, but other tracks uproot it. The three frontloaded covers are straightforward, but unlike "Rocket Man", they're also unimaginative and almost unlistenable. James peppers the band's straightlaced reading of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" with sound clips from Top Gun, which apparently passes for clever. That song is followed by an even greater disaster, an almost note-for-note cover of "West End Girls", on which James mimics Neil Tennant's half-spoken delivery without displaying the slightest awareness of the Pet Shop Boys' devastating decadence.
But covers are half-serious undertakings anyway, especially on a hodgepodge compilation like this, and besides, James' rendition of "Dream a Little Dream" is almost charming-- that is, until he starts puppy-whimpering at the end. Similarly, the full-band version of Hank Williams' "Why Don't You Love Me" is a hoot until the drum solo coda, which in the liner notes James calls "Hot!" but which might be better described as "Incredibly annoying!" This percussive sound spoils "Nothing 2 Me" as well, burying a signature My Morning Jacket melody under six feet of reverby drums. This sort of self-sabotage can often sound fascinating if it serves a larger purpose, but here it sounds self-indulgent, juvenile, and-- quite frankly-- openly hostile, as if James is daring you to keep listening. Granted, he gives you good reason to endure all the shrill noise with songs like the live version of "Bermuda Highway" and "I Will Be There When You Die/Sunrides and the Girls Scream", but that only seems to make the lesser songs all the more grating.
At their worst-- which is much of Learning-- these two hodgepodge volumes will interest only the die-hardest of fans, those who probably already own the Darla comps and the European-only EPs. But at their best-- which is most of The Sandworm Cometh-- they offer a compelling if not altogether listenable chronicle of a band with an already prickly creativity and only a nascent idea of what works and what doesn't. Taken together, they're about what you might expect from My Morning Jacket's early stuff, give or take.
