My Morning Jacket is a long-winded band. The band's shows are famed not only for their duration, but also for their energy and potency. Their career — going on 14 years — has lasted almost three times the life cycle of a normal rock band. Thanks to the six albums they've released, even including this year's slightly-warmer-than-luke-warm Circuital, fans are all but guaranteed a show full of hits and deep cuts spanning My Morning Jacket's career, no matter how they feel about the band's recorded music.
But one gets the feeling, listening to their records, that the band is running on fumes. The two albums released after the band's career high, Z, have failed to live up to fans' expectations. Seeing them perform live, however, reinvigorates the notion that they are the world's best live rock act. Lead singer Jim James has been known to span the width of the stage in a full sprint while digging into a guitar solo, and this is during the better part of their three-hour set. It's the kind of thing you can't capture on an album, and it will shed a different light on some of the songs fans skip over when listening to the band's newer material.
It might even put Circuital on your year-end top-10 list. Doubtful, though.
