Mike Brooks
Audio By Carbonatix
In hindsight, My Morning Jacket’s masterful third album, It Still Moves, is as much an apex as a finale.
The record, which celebrated its 20th anniversary on Sept. 9, marked the end of one phase for the Louisville, Kentucky-based band, and the beginning of another.
The band – led by the curly-haired, angel-voiced Jim James – saw two of its foundational members, guitarist Johnny Quaid and keyboardist Danny Cash, depart after recording Moves. Drummer Patrick Hallahan, who still keeps time for the quintet two decades later, had joined the Jacket’s ranks with this project.
There’s also the practical matter of this effort being the band’s first for a major label (ATO Records), which brought them greater visibility and forced them to figure out how (or whether) to appeal to a broader audience, and what bold, original artistic impulses might need to be curbed in the process.
Above all, however, this 72-minute collection captures all of those inherent contradictions – the palpable tensions – that made and still makes My Morning Jacket one of America’s most singular, and singularly thrilling, rock bands.
There are the echo-laden vocals, as James’ falsetto often sounds as if he’s singing from the darkest, farthest corners of the room. There’s the gnarly, dual-pronged guitar attack, as James and Quaid trade dueling riffs of dazzling intricacy and pleasurable bite. There are the achingly sweet melodies, laid against the kind of propulsive instrumental hurly-burly that stretches some tracks beyond seven minutes.
It Still Moves remains the band’s finest moment, a record when every element is in equilibrium and a collection of songs that kicks as hard now as it did when it arrived on the heels of two arresting predecessors, 1999’s The Tennessee Fire and 2001’s At Dawn. (It’s a striking three-album opening run, to be sure, and not one often replicated by My Morning Jacket’s contemporaries.)
James, who also produced Moves, has an unerring sense for how to capture a sound so expansive and ambitious it feels like scraping the edges of the known galaxy. That sense of transcendence – one that the band has long replicated in its mind-altering, wonderful live performances – is coupled with an almost painful intimacy in the lyrics James writes, whether it’s an affectionate ode to his guitar in the lush opener “Mageetah” (“Can he see me?/Does he feel me?/Does he know me at all?”) through the plaintive closer “One in the Same” (“It wasn’t ’til I woke up/That I could hold down a joke or a job or a dream/But then all three are one in the same”).
Contemporary critics were largely enthralled by what James and his collaborators accomplished: “An album by turns beautiful and possessed, by others raucous and fiery,” wrote Pitchfork in 2003. “My Morning Jacket have made the move to the bigs in tremendous style.”
But in reaching that summit, professionally and creatively, it was inevitable that My Morning Jacket would find itself coming up against the limits of its inventiveness. The follow-up to Moves, 2005’s Z, was a shift, dialing down the reverb and sprawl in favor of tighter, more soulful compositions.
Subsequent records would either lean into the weirdness (2008’s Evil Urges, 2011’s Circuital) or embrace epic thickets of sound (2015’s The Waterfall, 2020’s The Waterfall II), although 2021’s self-titled LP, the band’s ninth studio release overall, recalls It Still Moves and its deft splitting of the difference between deep-in-the-woods ambiance and fist-in-the-air rock grandeur.
Through it all, My Morning Jacket has retained and burnished its reputation as one of the most astonishing live acts in modern music, capable of three-hour excursions through its catalog that can levitate an audience. Snarling guitars and gorgeous harmonies, beauty and brutality in close proximity.
That blend of ferocity and delicacy is a hallmark of My Morning Jacket, manifested in Jim James’s crystalline voice threading in and around and through concussive, skyscraping instrumentation.
As easily as it all came together, though, it could have just as easily collapsed, as James acknowledged in a poignant, lengthy missive emailed to fans this past July.
“I still feel like a kid now, but when I look back on us then it seems we were only infants, drooling and crying and smiling and running wild trying to find our way out in the world,” he wrote. “In those early years, there was a lot of fun ‘first time beginner’s mind’ energy, but also a lot of turmoil and constant change.
“Anyone who knows anything about being in a touring rock band knows that it is very difficult to get off the ground, especially in those early years when you are driving thousands of miles to play for no one, sleeping on the floor of the van in the freezing cold, returning home with barely enough money for anyone to even buy a candy bar, much less pay any bills, but still, it was a grand adventure. We put it all on the line.”
