I have some good things and some bad things to say about this album. Starting with the good, My Morning Jacket have a great sound. Their arena-ready rock dabbles in a number of different styles, often sounding vaguely psychedelic, but they don’t have to try very hard to achieve moments of utter beauty, expansiveness, and majesty. Jim James’ vocals fit very nicely with their sound, except when he takes the falsetto to unfortunate extremes, as he does on “Holdin on to Black Metal.”
It’s no small feat to be able to put songs as different as “Victory Dance” (dark, slow-moving, moody, complex) and “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)” (simple, folky, light-hearted) on the same album and have it make sense. Their sound is so well-defined that they can expand their boundaries without making things feel like a huge departure.
Now the negative, and it’s an intangible that we can chalk up to subjective bias. There is something about Jim James’ vocal delivery that kind of dulls the impact of his words. Often I feel as though his vocals have no emotional weight to them. I have trouble believing some of the words he sings and I think it’s because his voice is so high that some purely subjective bias in me has trouble taking him seriously. I quite respect this band, but there’s something there that I can’t quite wrap my ears around.
I appreciate My Morning Jacket (and Circuital) on a purely aesthetic level. It’s art that I can consume and experience some audible beauty, but it doesn’t reach me on any personal level and so I feel a bit distanced from it. I could say the same about any of their albums, including Z (2005) and It Still Moves (2003), both of which I like better than Circuital, and Evil Urges, which I like less. In short, I can’t say anything all that bad about My Morning Jacket, but they aren’t really for me. The video below is of a performance of the title track, which is among their better songs, in my opinion.
7.3 / 10
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