For a guy defined by his band's take on "roots" music, Jim James' head has always been in the clouds. For the first few My Morning Jacket albums, he often recorded his vocals in an abandoned Kentucky grain silo, one of the few places that could give him the otherworldly reverb he desired. On any number of great My Morning Jacket songs-- "Gideon", "The Way That He Sings", "Circuital", "Golden"-- there's that moment when James cuts loose the sandbags and lets his voice pull the songs heavenward. It's a move drawn from gospel, but although his awareness of mortality is a matter of public record, James has never really affiliated himself with a particular religious ideology. He's a seeker with a strong moral compass, cobbling together beliefs from wherever, and relying on his music to help him transcend the earthly realm.
If My Morning Jacket's albums have mostly come together like a revival meeting-- a group playing live, working together to create something larger than its members-- James' first solo album, Regions of Light and Sound of God, emerges from something closer to meditation. James holed himself away in his Louisville home studio, writing and piecing together songs, playing most of the parts himself. It's process-based music, and he admits it in the album's first seconds. On "State of the Art (A.E.I.O.U.)", James breaks his creative process down to its primordial elements-- vowels, nursery rhymes-- like he's leading a workshop on discovering one's inner poet. Like everything he does, it's deeply self-conscious, wholly earnest, and just a slight bit goofy. And like so many artists chin-deep in Pro Tools, James distances himself from the claim that he's using production devices (computer software or metal silo walls) as creative crutches. As "A.E.I.O.U." slithers to life with a sinuous piano figure, James relates his manifesto: "I use my state of the art technology/ Now don't you forget it: it ain't usin' me."
Mastery over technology is a fitting metaphor for Regions' core theme: exceeding limitations in the interest of personal reinvention. Where in title and subject matter, Circuital marked a return to form for My Morning Jacket, Regions sees James pushing outward in all directions, stylistically and emotionally. At one extreme, there's the shimmering, nearly New Age "Of the Mother Again", suggesting the inevitability of change and the joy of falling in sync with nature's cycles. At the other end, there's "Dear One", with a retrofuturistic rhythm bed that sounds like Stereolab, and a title suggesting both a romantic ode and space exploration vehicle, on which James sees a relationship as a galactic journey: "You always pushed the boundaries of my soul/ With life and love we've finally gained control."
Though his hippy undertones might suggest otherwise, Regions is about asserting control. Even on "Mother", the dewiest track, James follows one lyric about nothing staying the same for long with another-- "close your eyes and its gone"-- that draws the song to a dramatic pause, before bringing it back with a funky rhythm section in tow. It's a theatrical moment on an album full of them-- Regions opens by channeling Traffic's 1971 glam-fusion epic "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys", and throughout, James is as comfortable as ever in his Mr. Fantasy guise. Even in My Morning Jacket's earliest moments, he's styled himself a ringleader capable of sonic wizardry, a strummy Southerner cut from the showy mold of Elton John or Wayne Coyne.
On "A New Life", he turns a simple folk song into a showtune, in a way that nods toward Bowie's Hunky Dory. As the song plays out, James adds bits of musical scenery, as if stagehands keep rolling new canvas backdrops behind him. By the end, "Life" blossoms into musical theater, balancing sweetness and schmaltz in a way that only James can. He can't make an album without cheese, this much is obvious-- the less said about the well-intentioned Martin Luther King ode "God's Love", the better-- but as "A New Life" shows, when he's able to rein it in, the results are engrossing. (And when he can't help but crack up the second time he sings "I think I'm really being sincere," you know he's in on his own joke.)
Regions' best moments come when James' sense of wonder and fear are most palpable. On "Know 'Til Now", he channels a face-to-face-with-the-sublime feeling that leaves him wordless, though far from exultant. Sounding like a VHS recording of an old 16mm reel of a clipped sample of a long-unheard soul revue, "Know" took more than a few James fans aback as the album's first single. Yet as "Wordless Chorus" showed, he's uniquely capable of letting the spirit move him past the limits of language, and the lyrics to "Know" offer a glimpse into what feels like an inner monologue-- "How could I have known/ How sweet it could be!"-- before he steps aside and lets the music take over. Instead of the beatific skyward glance we might expect, however, the song's sultry, Lynchian coda aims backward to My Morning Jacket's own genesis, painting from the same color palette as the doo-wop influenced "They Ran" from the band's 1999 debut. On "Know"'s companion piece, "All is Forgiven", however, James finally lets his voice, spirit, fears, and hopes loose. As he wails, he's complemented not by a children's chorus or a pipe organ, but by a sweltering saxophone and mid-tempo rhythm section. It's a surreal effect: a sidelong glance at the expectations for such a song.
Isolation can often lead to indulgence, but not here. In less confident hands (including those of a younger Jim James), creative solitude could easily result in an unwieldly conceptual opus. Blessedly, Regions is the opposite: a svelte, sweet collection clocking in at under 40 minutes-- the shortest album of his career. While addressing the same themes he's been tweaking for more than a decade now, James adds a new trick to his ever-expanding repertoire: transforming the boundless possibilities of solo creativity into a cohesive one-man show.
