Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 15/09/2003
Label: BMG

Though heralding from Kentucky, My Morning Jacket could well inhabit a parallel universe. What they create on 'It Still Moves', their third album, is strange, familiar and otherworldly. A huge, uncontainable vacuum of sound. Combining silo-size portions of reverb with unaffected purity (there are few effects pedals plugged into these wonderful songs) they have created a delicately woven masterpiece.

Some are already calling it a landmark. This year's 'Deserter's Songs' or 'Soft Bulletin'. In truth it's probably better than both of those records.

Humorous title aside (the sleeve shows a huge stuffed bear draped with glitter) the band entice you in with three bona fide classics. Opener 'Mahgeetah' is the nearest thing to a pop song - 'Everybody's Talkin'' played on celestial harps. Compact, though still pushing six-minutes in length, it builds and breaks down, forming different shapes each time.

'Dancefloors' is Little Feat jamming with The Band and concludes with a horns 'n' guitars breakdown last heard when Keef 'n' Mick Taylor spat out 'Can't You Hear Me Knockin'. 'Golden' is a rolling country lament where the ghosts of Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash inhabit Jim James' regretful voice. "People always told me, that bars are dark and lonely," he croons, "...but nothing could ever chill me like the way they make the time just disappear."

In The Jacket's world every note, every sound, is slowed to an echo until it rings with a sort of ethereal resonance. It's a world of zero gravity. 'Matrix'-like, you imagine sticking your hand inside to find it lost in another dimension as fifty years of American musical history flash past - Neil Young, most obviously in James' vocals, but also Phil Spector and Jack Nitzsche. Rock'n'roll Heaven in other words.

In a strange way it also brings to mind The Verve's 'A Northern Soul'. Not only that strange spaced-out sense of emptiness, but the relentless soul-searching of the lyrics. The belief that some higher force is out at play in the world. Like Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, James elevates the ordinary to levels of supernatural wonderment. The sheer impossibility of being alive that connects all of us breathing. And like the Lips, his band provides the perfect soundtrack - a widescreen, Technicolored palette of melody.

"Too all the people I've loved," he sings on the closing hymnal 'One In The Same', "don't think poor of me. It wasn't till 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... ; then ALL are one in the same, and all of us are one in the same."

This is not a record you dip into - you've got dive in and embrace it. Live with it. If it's a film it's a four-hour epic. If it's a book then it's 'Don DeLillo'. If we must have a world with George W Bush and Dunkin' Donuts in it, if we must have Americana, then let it be this.

    by Adam Webb