Classic rock devotees My Morning Jacket have made it to double figures. The Kentucky-formed band’s new album is their 10th. Is (stylised is) represents a fresh start following 2021’s My Morning Jacket, a 60-minute sprawler recorded amid uncertainties about their future. That one featured tracks dredged from jamming sessions with titles such as “Complex” and “Lucky to Be Alive”. This one has jaunty songs called “Everyday Magic” and “Beginning from the Ending”.
The album is their first with an outside producer, Brendan O’Brien, a seasoned hand at the top-end of the rock circuit whose previous credits include Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam. His role in the studio was previously taken by the band’s frontman Jim James, the chief architect of their throwback sound. He and his bandmates evoke the liberated groove of a bygone era, back when hair was shaggy and riffs rang out like cosmic truths. They do so not in the style of epigones, but dreamers for whom the past is as vividly alive as the present.
“Please take a message and put it to a beat,” James sings on “Half a Lifetime”. His own message boils down to the hippy credo that love is all, uttered in a mellow voice made bigger by reverb and double-tracking. Unexceptional phrasemaking about time waiting for no one and life going on is made to sound warmer and more meaningful than it looks in the cold light of the printed page.
“Out in the Open” finds the singer having a quasi-religious experience with a special someone as dawn breaks. Reminiscent of U2 and The War on Drugs, the music is epic in scope but tidier-sounding than the band’s usual style. “Everyday Magic” brings a loose, funky sensibility to catchy soft-rock. “I Can Hear Your Love” is a feathery romantic song with a twee hint of doo-wop.
The best moments come when they loosen the shackles. “Squid Ink” is uproariously old-school funk-rock, while “Die for It” unleashes a psychedelic blaze of guitars. Closing track “River Road” has a twisty, brooding intensity. It makes the genially upbeat mood of the earlier songs seem forced.
★★★☆☆
‘Is’ is released by ATO Records
