Do you realize—or even remember—how exciting My Morning Jacket felt for a five-year span, two decades ago? Just after the start of this millennium, they were the inland answer to the rise of New York’s sleek rock’n’roll cool, the Kentucky longhairs who harnessed the spirit of their Southern rock predecessors but had panoramic artistic ambitions, too. At Dawn was a mystical country rock wonder, Jim James’ falsetto cresting like the sun over a canyon. It Still Moves was the stuff of accidental guitar gods, of a band that nearly broke itself from so much touring but survived long enough to capture at least some of its onstage phosphorescence. And Z brilliantly answered a question no one else had bothered to ask: What if some posi dudes who knew it was pronounced ‘Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd’ also knew what made Radiohead so compelling? It always seemed fitting that My Morning Jacket’s legendary 2004 performance at Bonnaroo—capturing the lightning of a band sprinting between their two best albums, during a summer downpour—was dubbed “Thunderdome”: My Morning Jacket felt like a fucking power source.
But in the 20 years since, as My Morning Jacket has become a respectable institution that hosts and headlines festivals and hometown soirees, anyone who cared has waited in vain for that thrill to return. After self-consciously trying to shirk their Southern ties on 2008’s calamitous Evil Urges, a record once presented as “the album of their lives,” 2011’s half-interesting Circuital was touted as a “return to form,” a classic stratagem for a band with a flagging vision. A 2015 profile loudly praised that year’s very OK The Waterfall as their “best album in a decade,” though they’d only made two others. It all felt a little like apologia for middle-aged male mediocrity, hoping for the frisson of youth to return like magic. They’ve since tried three distinct strategies to get back: revisiting years-old recordings on the pleasant The Waterfall II, snipping and stitching bits of jams into a top-heavy self-titled LP, and, on the declaratively titled is, yielding control for the first time ever to a new-to-them producer, Brendan O’Brien. Alas, the wait continues.
The story they’re offering this time around certainly sounds good: After infamous struggles with the injuries and indignities of the road, the members of My Morning Jacket have found excitement in mid-40s contentment. “I don’t think we’ve ever felt younger or more alive than we do now,” drummer Patrick Hallahan said last year, attributing some of that to sobriety. What’s more, the prospect of working with O’Brien seemed to supercharge them, prompting more than 100 demos in two extended writing sessions. James made rough recordings in his home studio and wrote still more when the band finally rendezvoused with O’Brien at what was once the fabled A&M.
O’Brien, though, has rarely been a reinvent-your-band guy. Rage’s Evil Empire, Bruce’s The Rising, Train’s Drops of Jupiter: He is a producer who helps a veteran act streamline and resurface its sound for the major label hoping to recoup his fee. That is mostly what happens on is, where the exploratory excesses of a quarter-century get slimmed into 10 songs that never break the five-minute mark and don’t collectively crack 40 minutes. From the squiggly disco-rock of “Die for It” to the Motown swerve of “I Can Hear Your Love,” these cuts are uniformly loud, all levels boosted as if My Morning Jacket—at their most absorbing when they were ultra-dynamic, their albums like particularly dramatic roller-coasters—were locked in a loudness war with their past.
The musical eccentricity that made even the most maddening My Morning Jacket records interesting has been tucked squarely into the corners, too, or used as onramps to get somewhere bigger, flashier, more emphatic, more predictable. The piano reverie and cavernous James vocal that begin “Time Waited,” for instance, are tender, beautiful, and curious. They ultimately become building blocks for a song so plodding and massive you half-expect Train’s Pat Monahan to ad lib something about deep-fried chicken. O’Brien plays the part of the algorithmic hall monitor here, making sure these songs slide into separate streams without any interruption.
At least is preserves the My Morning Jacket tradition of boasting an incredible opener, a song that reaffirms how life-affirming this band can actually be. “Out in the Open” rises through a choir of static to find James alone and stranded and scared, nylon-stringed guitar and an insistent rhythm goading him forward. “In the light of the sun/the waters run,” James sings in the refrain, the kind of hackneyed line he’s forever been able to turn into scripture through sheer charm. He stretches the last words until they link, caught together in perpetual motion. O’Brien smartly punches up the track, adding the sort of dramatic accents that make it feel like a prime E Street triumph.
My Morning Jacket doesn’t heed its own song’s call for personal liberation, though. The remaining nine songs fill the requisite slots of a My Morning Jacket album in 2025—the psych-soul slab of “Half a Lifetime,” the slow-build climax and cut-and-paste guitar heroics of “Beginning from the Ending,” the country-gothic mystique of a closer about rambling on, “River Road.” Their parts are so neatly scripted they often sound like plug-ins, from the stock riff that snakes through “Half a Lifetime” to the up-tempo shuffle that serves as the foundation of “Lemme Know.” It’s as if O’Brien set out to make the paragon of a modern My Morning Jacket album and succeeded in both style and sound, only forgetting to leave room for the surprises that actually gave their early works ineffable power. It’s boring.
It is reasonable to ask what I—an old-time My Morning Jacket zealot who has hoped for their return to wonder for 20 years—now want from this band. More spectral acoustics? More brawny guitar heroics? More wordless choruses? I mostly want MMJ to act less like an LLC. After they stumbled with their highly suspicious experiments on the sometimes-interesting but grossly unfocused Evil Urges, they lost the playful impulse to try anything they wanted. They now seem permanently hamstrung by the desire to just be “good.” The rewards of frictionless streaming and festival ecosystems have reinforced that propensity, and they have repeatedly taken different trails, from big-name producers to freeform jams, to the same safe places.
I suppose I want them to get weird for the sake of figuring out what kind of band they can still become. “Don’t ever, no, give up your power,” James sings during “Squid Ink,” a goofy series of self-help mantras howled over a proto-metal riff. The moment works because it seems so guileless and unguarded. But James’ singular voice notwithstanding, My Morning Jacket gave up its best power—to try new ideas, with confidence and clarity—long ago. The line comes close enough to the end of is, though, that maybe they take it as advice and finally get back to a long-ago, once-promising future.
