A perfect circle
Returned after six years’ hiatus, the Louisvillians’ magic glows brighter than ever. By Stevie Chick.
My Morning Jacket ★★★★
My Morning Jacket ATO. CD/DL/LP
INTERVIEWS FROM 2019 – when My Morning Jacket played their first live shows after going on hiatus following 2015’s The
Waterfall (2020’s Waterfall II was assembled from its predecessor’s offcuts) – suggest Jim James had put his long-running group on ice because he felt stultified by the familiar. The solo albums that followed certainly gave his paradigm a firm shake: soulful psychedelic excursions, a collaboration with the Louisville Orchestra, an album of garage-style, firstthought-is-best-thought rock’n’roll.
There was, however, little doubt James would eventually reunite My Morning Jacket; some bonds are too deeply wired to deny. Their eponymous ninth finds James returning from his wanderings to home-base, and perhaps, like T.S. Eliot, truly knowing it for the first time, unabashedly rejoicing in the strengths of this group, these players. The tracks often find space for exultant instrumental codas, In Color, Never In The Real World and Lucky To Be Alive all closing with ecstatic guitar colloquies between James and Carl Broemel. I Never Could Get Enough, meanwhile, drifts out to the horizon on an elegiac tide of ambient synths, supernatural guitar and graceful rhythms that could eddy on for eternity.
But while several of My
Morning Jacket’s tracks sail purposefully beyond the seven-minute mark, a keen economy and balance are always at play. An expert rejuvenator of classic rock tropes, James is never yoked to the past, weaving his influences into a cosmic Americana perfectly of its own time. His solo albums engaged with the turbulent political moment more confidently than before, and that’s the songwriter at skilful work here. The evils of the internet age are a recurrent motif, though any curmudgeonliness is leavened by the wry tenor of James’s take on a musician’s woes in the streaming era on Lucky To Be Alive (“Technology came and stole my living again,” he rues in its opening line).
James’s theme bites deeper on The Devil’s In The Details, its sombre, gauzy space-folk ruminating on late-era capitalism’s rending of the fabric of America. A vision of a nation where the mall is heaven, where materialism and its distractions mask grand injustices, and cosmetics from Sephora will cure all ills, the polemic is lent subtlety by James’ haunting vocal. And when he briefly punctures the illusion with imagery of impoverished children sent to war while the offspring of privilege are “safely sound asleep”, it’s a powerful, jarring moment of clarity.
Despite this bleak peak, the overriding mood of My Morning Jacket is one of joy, the deft chug of Least Expected intertwining a story of regenerative love with a message of triumph over intolerance, James imbibing the gravitas of Roy Orbison as he croons, “I wish
everybody could agree” during In Color. These are simple messages, delivered earnestly, but the magic of this group has always been their ability to translate the elemental into the transcendental. It is a miracle they pull off frequently on My Morning
Jacket, with confidence and inspiration, every moment a fresh beginning.
Lonely Guest ★★★★ Lonely Guest
FALSE IDOLS. CD/DL/LP
THE LAST time Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws, AKA Tricky, went out under another alias, he was sitting pretty. It was 1996, and the wayward Massive Attack rapper had unexpectedly hit the Top 5 with a solo debut,
Maxinquaye. Still not conclusively signed to major label Island, he could break the rules, muddying the label’s campaign by devising a more collaborative sequel under the nom de
guerre Nearly God – a satire on the hype then engulfing him – starring Terry Hall and Björk.
Twenty-five years on, now resident in Berlin,
Tricky is still the same hyperactive refusenik, self-releasing five albums since 2013, though now very much at the margins – electively so. Ever collaborative (2017’s latter-day highlight Ununiform briefly reunited him with his Maxinquaye foil/partner Martina Topley-Bird), Lonely Guest finds him retreating even further into the shadows, as a varied cast of guests, including Joe Talbot from fellow Bristolians Idles and Jamaican legend, the late Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, dominate the mike.
For such a peripatetic street artist, lockdown saw Tricky become the stranded expat, the Lonely Guest. After losing Mina Mazy, his daughter by Martina, in May 2019, he’d coped with the bereavement by studiobingeing to make 2020’s Fall To Pieces.
Suddenly unable to tour it, he responded by plunging back into recording, giving himself and other loyal/respected musicians something to do, albeit remotely.
Lapsed listeners will recognise Tricky’s pervasively ornery vibe, but marvel at the absence of stumbling trip-hop beats and impenetrable sonic clutter. The title track ushers in a spare but no less disquieting soundworld, with just the simplest circular keyboard figure (like a children’s music box stuck mid-play) and cello-meets-dubstep bass squelches accompanying the frosty coo of Marta Złakowska – his Krakow-born vocal foil.
Arguably the early sampling era’s greatest juxtaposer, Tricky brilliantly blends three contrasting voices on Pre-War Tension, as Joe Talbot growls of “a Macey’s parade-sized pink elephant,” Złakowska sees “war…in your eyes” and the man himself mumbles of “concrete towers… trouble and strife”, with any binding narrative slipping mysteriously between its spacious guitar chords.
Under turns on a dime towards alarmingly approachable synth/slow beats backing and sublimely crystalline singing from Denmark’s Oh Land, while Leytonstone crooner Murkage Dave and Croydon rapper Kway soon chicane into ultra-minimal dark takes on, respectively, contemporary R&B (Pay My Taxes) and grime (On A Move).
The long-mooted ‘Scratch’ team-up is a sketchy abstraction, and, at barely 27 minutes, Lonely Guest can feel slightly elusive. There is, however, limitless satisfaction in Move Me’s triumphant grunge riff (ref. Maxinquaye’s Pumpkin), and Christmas Tree, where Maximo Park’s Paul Smith flatly intones, “I miss you”, and then, “I hope that I’m still alive next year.” In that devastatingly poignant refrain, bridging personal tragedy and Covid universality, this pathological outsider once again chills the blood, effortlessly clinching artistic relevance.