Ed Downer samples the hazy delights of My Morning Jacket‘s latest offering…

organic is good for the soul | weirdness and dreaming | let it all wash over you…

Organic is good for the soul
My Morning Jacket come over as a very organic band; their songs sound as if they were grown from seed and carefully nurtured into fruition. The band mix loads of musical genres from around their native America without creating an unnatural tone. Much of the peculiarity and earthliness they are famed for remains as the majority of songs on their new album, Z, casually mooch around in a misty musical quagmire where a plethora of sounds mix and murmur in the background with only the plaintive cries of singer Jim James’ voice piercing through it all. Opening track Wordless Chorus is given a sense of purpose by a waltzing bass-line but it is not until the single Off the Record and the follow-on tracks Anytime and Lay Low that the complex intertwining melodies and refreshing guitars that have been threatening to emerge actually make their presence felt.

Weirdness and dreaming
On the one hand, the complex and brooding rumblings of the majority of the album could unsettle you with their downright weirdness. However, on the other hand, their dizzying, dreamy qualities are brilliant at taking the edge off things and transporting you to a hazy organic utopia. Z was recorded in a proper studio as opposed to a barn where all My Morning Jacket’s previous work has been crafted. As a result, in comparison to its wilder cousins, Z is a more domesticated and packaged album but its strangeness still shows through and adds a little novelty to it…rather like a bonsai tree.

Let it all wash over you…
In terms of eerie atmospheric music, Doves may have colonised the cities and Radiohead may have conquered space but My Morning Jacket have managed to cling on to the deep, dark recesses of the wild and produce a refreshing dose of living, breathing music at a time when neatly tailored, angular chords and precise crisp beats are the norm. All this album asks you to do is to let it wash over you. Rather like alternative medicine, some may frown the credibility of My Morning Jacket but deep down you know that, like organic food and herbal tea, going natural somehow just feels better.