Just say maybe to the first half of My Morning Jacket’s uneven psychedelic-beach output
It’s all about location, location, location. Toward the end of 2013, Jim James and Co. arrive at a recording studio in Northern California, unpack their bags, and proceed to get cosmic, singing about life, death and reincarnation. It doesn’t hurt that they’re overlooking the Pacific Ocean, that the beach is covered in fog every morning, or that they can see the lights of San Francisco in the distance.
For James, “Every record has the spirit of where we made it,” so they start out high above the Pacific, listening to some rough demos, just enough to give the band a sense of the melodies. Then, once everyone is settled in, they simply roll tape and come out the other end with 24 finished songs. Somehow, they decide what tracks will become The Waterfall and what tracks will be released as a separate album in 2016. And somehow, James leaves feeling “so psychedelic and focused. It was almost like we lived on our own little moon out there. It feels like you’re up in the sky.”
I bet it did, and I wish I could’ve been there to share the psychedelia, and maybe understand how “psychedelic” and “focused” can fit in the same sentence. Let’s give Panoramic House’s 24-track analog tape deck credit for birthing an incredibly confident set of songs, each one dazzling in its multilayered swirl of influences, its scope, its rock-bottom faith in the power of an electric-guitar solo. The best of them, like the falsetto, funky “Compound Fracture,” the soul-country “Only Memories Remain” and the arena-rocking “Big Decisions,” are so good you can practically hear the sound of cigarette lighters flicking high in the air, begging for one more, just one more.
But going to the beach, kicking back and rolling tape is also a recipe for making a mess, even if it’s a beautiful mess, an album that’s smaller than the sum of its parts. The influences on The Waterfall cover the map from prog to soul to folk-trad to country to pop to metal, with the songs moving in multiple directions at once, almost all of them backward. Most of the time, the verse comes from one world and the chorus from another, and as the worlds collide, there are clear rumblings of the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Curtis Mayfield, Harry Nilsson, Pink Floyd and, especially, Yes.
Since MMJ’s last album, 2011’s Circuital, Yes has become a dominant influence—at least, that’s what I hear, and it’s not a good thing. There’s Yes in the song structures, the dynamics, the guitar arpeggios, the wordless vocals, the organs, the sense of scale. It’s everywhere: in the echoes, and in the cosmic echoes of the echoes. I keep waiting for the band to shift into “Roundabout” or “Your Move,” and once Yes fatigue sets in, as it did for me after about a dozen listens to The Waterfall, it’s really hard to shake.
—Kenny Berkowitz
