Music

We have no wish to trivialise the latest album by these peerless alt.country rockers from Kentucky, but it could easily be used in a parlour game. Play the track ‘Highly Suspicious’ to a friend and ask them to guess who it is. Shake your head as they run through the list of suspects – Rick James? Run DMC? Prince? The White Stripes? – and then triumphantly inform them that it’s My Morning Jacket. Yes, way! Suggesting an inspired grafting of ‘Walk This Way’ on to ‘Icky Thump’, it’s MMJ’s least My Morning Jacket-like tune ever, but in the context of the LP, it represents an obvious desire to shift shape without losing their identity altogether. That it was recorded not in their usual rural environment, but in NYC’s Avatar Studios underlines the band’s resolve to shake shit up, fifth time around.

Fans need not panic, however. Jim James’s soulful, reverb-drenched roar and dizzyingly sweet falsetto still work their magic, as does MMJ’s blend of churning, gnarly punk/alt. rock and ’70s AM-radio-friendly country pop, which embraces Bread and The Eagles almost as warmly as it does Hank Williams, Neil Young, James Taylor, The Blasters and the Boss. Picking highlights here is like trying to isolate the brightest stars in the Milky Way, but worth special mention are the languid, pedal-steel-strafed ‘Look At You’, Screaming Trees-like rockathon ‘Remnants’, ‘Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Part 2’ (which reveals James as a Tangerine Dream fan) and the lovely ‘Librarian’, which cuts clichés about girls with glasses letting down their hair with talk of books’ replacement by ‘the interweb’. None of which will erase the shock of ‘Highly Suspicious’, but any of MMJ’s urges – evil or not – are just fine by us.