{"id":44345,"date":"2015-12-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-17T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/the-waterfall\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T11:20:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T11:20:10","slug":"the-waterfall","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/the-waterfall\/","title":{"rendered":"The Waterfall"},"content":{"rendered":"

It only took me 16 years\u2014and a single song played on Late Night With Stephen Colbert<\/i> in November, this album\u2019s soaring, enigmatic \u201cTropics (Erase Traces)\u201d\u2014to realize that I should maybe check out My Morning Jacket. (I know, I know. Kinda pathetic. But I have a history<\/a> of this.) <\/p>\n

As most of you reading this probably already know, the group that All Music Guide calls \u201cKentucky\u2019s answer to Wilco\u201d plays a kind of fractured-and-reassembled-with-different-parts Americana, infused with influences from Smokey Robinson to Pink Floyd. Call it swamp-soul-psychedelia, or whatever other exotic hybrid you can come up with; it seems that the one thing you can count on with MMJ is that they will do what they do in an unconventional way.<\/p>\n

That includes previously adventures recording frontman and songwriter Jim James\u2019s lead vocals in a grain silo, and this album, wherein the Louisville-based collective (which also includes Tom Blankenship, Patrick Hallahan, Carl Broemel and Bo Koster) decamped to Northern California to record. The resulting disc The Waterfall<\/i> is a wonderfully dreamy album full of cotton-candy melodies wafting through elliptical songs that are sometimes about things and sometimes not, but invariably warm and clever and mysterious. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s so much going on here that it\u2019s easy to get lost in the forest without focusing on the trees. One minute \u201cCompound Fracture\u201d is combining a slinky r&b groove with a dip into moral philosophy (\u201cThere\u2019s no evil, there\u2019s no good \/ Only people doin\u2019 like they should \/ Or as they shouldn\u2019t in the light of day \/ \u2018God\u2019 and the \u2018devil\u2019 were made up anyway\u201d). The next the band is framing James\u2019 remarkable falsetto with ascending strings and multi-part harmonies fresh from a 1972 Yes album (\u201cLike A River\u201d). And farther along they unleash a dreamy soul tune (\u201cThin Line\u201d) featuring James\u2019 delicate vocals astride a silvery guitar line that eventually erupts into an emphatic solo, the whole unlikely concoction coming off as vaguely deranged.<\/p>\n

Still, the experimental flair of rangy tunes like \u201cIn Its Infancy (The Waterfall)\u201d and \u201cSpring (Among The Living)\u201d is offset by moments like \u201c\u201dGet The Point,\u201d a sweet, sad, concise and quite straightforward folk-rock ballad of romantic resignation that wouldn\u2019t be out of place on a mid-70s America album. \u201cBig Decisions\u201d has similarly mainstream tendencies, a co-write with Dan Wilson (Semisonic) that achieves a punchy, keening Badfinger feel on the choruses, albeit with slide guitar and strings decorating the edges of the frame.<\/p>\n

The album is anchored and propelled by a pair of highlights that hit hard early and late. Opener \u201cBelieve (Nobody Knows)\u201d promises an intense journey with a spacey, almost hypnotic opening that builds steadily into an increasingly fervent refrain of \u201cBelieve \/ Believe \/ Believe.\u201d The lyric is a superbly crafted poem capturing the tension between belief and unbelief, faith and uncertainty. Humans have an ingrained, fundamental desire to believe in something bigger than ourselves, but the difficult truth is, \u201cNobody knows.\u201d <\/p>\n

At the other end of the album, the minor opus the band delivered on The Late Show<\/i>, \u201cTropics (Erase Traces),\u201d is stunning, a brilliant, surrealistic slice of prog-Americana. \u201cOut of body for the first time \/ In a long time \/ The right time \/ Window to another world\u201d sings James, his forceful cadence gathering urgency as the music builds. Around 3:30 they move into a surging solo section with careening, stabbing guitar, working up to a crescendo that aims for transcendence, and hits the mark. Only a quiet song could follow, and it does. The album finishes in a sort of spent fugue state with \u201cOnly Memories Remain,\u201d the slowest, dreamiest, spaciest Motown ballad you ever heard sung by a white boy from Kentucky.<\/p>\n

The word I keep coming back to with My Morning Jacket is odd; it\u2019s an adjective they invite and embrace. But they\u2019re odd in technicolor, with tremendous musical ambition, imagination and flair, simultaneously laconic and compelling. The bottom line is, you\u2019re pretty much either going to dig what they do or not\u2014and I\u2019m digging it. The Waterfall<\/i> feels like a vivid dream, a woozy, beguiling fantasy travelogue of the past 50 years of American music.<\/p>\n

Clearly, MMJ and I will be continuing this conversation in 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":32581,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8314],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-44345","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-my-morning-jacket","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=44345"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=44345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}