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What’s there left to say about My Morning Jacket as a stay act? Lore and eyewitness accounts verify that they’ve all the time been mighty, whether or not overshadowing Ben Kweller and Guided by Voices as a barnstorming opener of their early days or creating their very own Mount Olympus with a career-defining set at Bonnaroo in 2008. Hell, final night time’s kickoff of their three-show Brooklyn Paramount run wasn’t even the primary time that they had played 2005’s Z front to back in NYC.
As a (someway) first-time eyewitness to their stay present myself, I might run down the usual audiovisual reportage: Jim James toggling between wavy frontman choreography (opener “Wordless Refrain”) and elephantine shredding (“Anytime”); utility wunderkind turned elder statesman Carl Broemel calmly slipping into sax mode for an prolonged album finale (“Dondante”); Patrick Hallahan’s hair-raising snare hits; the backlighting of old-school LED grids that, by easy triangulation, mutated a smiley face right into a constellation of the under-the-knife owl beak that graces Z’s cowl artwork.
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However in the event you’re a fan and even simply somebody who’s casually caught one in every of MMJ’s live shows previously, you’ve already seen the band’s craftsmanship and volcanic power on show. You don’t want somebody to extoll their in-the-flesh greatness, unparalleled as it could be and doubtless has been since their inception. This morning, head nonetheless blissfully buzzing from final night time, I discover myself fascinated by what Z meant when it was launched 20 years in the past and what it means by the lens of stay efficiency in 2025.
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It could appear quaint now in a post-social media age when style boundaries have all however disappeared for music followers, however Z felt like the toughest of pivots within the early aughts. It was an evolution from three albums of rootsy jamming (most notably, 2003’s It Nonetheless Strikes) to spacey synthesizers, shorter tune lengths, and lyrics that skewed extra surrealistic (or perhaps religious, relying by yourself non secular convictions), all of which earned MMJ the now-tired superlative of “the American Radiohead” from a number of publications.
The psychedelic detour proved to be prophetic not just for the band themselves (subsequent releases Evil Urges and Circuital would each be seen as equally and even controversially metamorphic), however a number of later acts who would fall underneath the loosely outlined umbrella of “alt nation” — a minimum of sooner or later throughout their rise. Sturgill Simpson, Huge Thief, and even Kings of Leon would all come out of the gate saddled with the Americana label, solely to go just a little extra cosmic a number of albums in. And whereas MMJ definitely wasn’t the primary country-adjacent act to drastically weirden their sound, Z (together with Wilco’s Yankee Lodge Foxtrot) looks like the fashionable template for doing so.
The place the band’s transformation in 2005 felt purely aesthetic, nevertheless, listening to the document’s morphing sounds in a stay setting 20 years later felt contextual and thematic — a response to the chaos of recent historical past within the making. When James lastly addressed the gang on the album’s midway level — between an additional dubbed-out “Off the File” and extra-carnivalized “Into the Woods” — he spoke briefly concerning the album’s significance of their profession and its relationship to New York (the band relocated from their native Louisville to the Catskills for recording). He then went on to proclaim that everybody within the ornate Brooklyn Paramount ballroom was on a brand new airplane of consciousness collectively to have a good time peace and love.
Now, I understand how these phrases look on paper — imprecise, shamanistic, even perhaps cultish. And being invited to let free and revel in one’s self in an surroundings of rising authoritarianism isn’t precisely revelatory. However it’s more and more important amidst the worry, violence, and turbulence of 2025 and past, and James has all the time come throughout as honest in his requires concord. The brevity of his banter additionally prevented it from being condescending or sermonizing.
With all of that in thoughts, the expansiveness of Z abruptly felt heavier, a reminder of the significance of staying versatile — artistically, socially, societally — so we will maintain onto some happiness in a world that none of us can predict. And by the beginning of a second, non-Z set, it turned clear that every one the varied shards of MMJ’s prismatic identification have been nonetheless there and all the time had been — previous, current, and future. Encore nearer “Magheeta” took on just a little little bit of the cybernetic freakiness of Z (the LEDs helped), the stay debut of oddity “The Satan’s Peanut Butter” off the Z 20th anniversary edition was a right away fusion of the pre- and post-Z eras, and are available to think about it, had “Off the File” even been that dubbed out, or have been the riffs extra-muscular and mountained up? In all probability each. Even the three cuts from this 12 months’s is have been already seeing their accessibility give method to amorphism.
It’s additionally value mentioning the large stuffed bears which have been an onstage mainstay nearly so long as My Morning Jacket have been a band. They’ve all the time been considerably totemic, with one in every of them famously gracing the quilt of It Nonetheless Strikes as a form of image of significant steerage. However the ursine imagery was particularly palpable final night time, a specter of a previous that had by no means actually disappeared within the first place. For a legendary stay act, owl and bear are in the identical menagerie, inventive pivots finally come full circle to blur the strains of a number of genres, and elasticity turns into a method of achievement — and thus a method of survival — for band and viewers alike.
Get tickets to the My Morning Jacket’s upcoming tour dates — together with extra full Z performances — here. See a full picture gallery and setlist from the band’s Brooklyn Paramount live performance under.
My Morning Jacket Setlist:
Z:
Wordless Refrain
It Beats 4 U
Gideon
What a Great Man
Off the File
Into the Woods
Anytime
Lay Low
Knot Comes Free
Dondante
Chills
The place to Start
Half a Lifetime
The Satan’s Peanut Butter
Squid Ink
Wasted / En La Ceremony / Wasted
Encore:
Tropics (Erase Traces)
Smokin’ From Shootin’
Die For It
Mahgeetah
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