My Morning Jacket - Okonokos (Sony BMG)
4/5
By: Charlie Potter
Well, first of all, you've got to give them credit for releasing a double live album.
At times, the apparently very ambitious My Morning Jacket can sound like Coldplay with balls (and hair on those balls), but instead of having Chris Martin tell you how much he likes Kraftwerk as he's always so keen to mention, you've got this lot saying 'yeah, I've really gotten in to listening to Chris Isaak and Deep Purple at the same time, but in slow motion'. Yet all of the comparisons you can make regarding My Morning Jacket are inadequate, as even the consistent references to country don't really cover enough of their sound to be used with any real conviction. They really do have a sound of their own, such a natural one that it's not until you stop and think about it that you conclude you actually can't put them in any specific place, either in your head, or the music world. The right to utter the line 'we are the innovators, they are the imitators' from first track 'Wordless Chorus' is truly earned in the case of this band.
My Morning Jacket are undoubtedly the sort of band you would expect to be good live. Having been privileged to such a sight, I am for some reason compelled to say there's something about 'Okonokos' that reminds me of the Residents' album 'Eskimo', which as you may have guessed is an album about Eskimos and puts you in mind of only cold places. On the accompanying instructions for listening to the album, rather than tell you to make yourself cold to sympathise with the Eskimos, the Residents advise you to be somewhere warm and comfortable, preferably by a fire with a blanket wrapped around you. Well, right now I'm sat with a blanket wrapped around me, and if I had a fire I'd light it. As I sit here all I can think of is My Morning Jacket on a cold cliff edge at the end of the world, playing to millions of people who are also freezing, and I like to ponder to myself about what a warm feeling it is to imagine such a thing.
Despite my glee at the scenario, this isn't to say that I wouldn't have loved to have been at any of these shows in person. There's something about the onstage echo and crowd noise that make these soaring guitar sounds sound all the more huge. A lot of people who enjoy Oasis live always go on about the soaring guitars, and having seen a bit of the Gallagher's set I would strongly advise any of those holding such a shoddy opinion to go see My Morning Jacket, a band from whom you get all the benefits of that soaring without some idiot talking rubbish at you.
As crazy as it sounds, if it wasn't for the fact that the crowds obviously know the songs from listening to the studio recordings and that adds to the atmosphere of the recording, I'd go as far as to say that My Morning Jacket should record all their albums like this. When you think of live albums, you can often think 'oh no! Lots of crusty noise with a mix that isn't faithful to how it would have sounded in the audience!', but thankfully this really isn't the case here. You couldn't say it's crystal clear either, but the important thing is you can hear very well both the low sounds and the high sounds, and you're able to pick out all the individual instruments fine and dandy.
They're not the sort of band that would miss all the effects and vocal layering they pile on in the studio. Maybe it's a bit of an extreme idea to suggest they record all their albums on a stage, but you must admit it is at least a great thing that they're able to so faithfully represent even the newer tracks from 'Z' on this LP. Considering they were thinking of releasing a live album years ago and took so long to get round to it we should be thankfully for 'Okonokos' very existence, as it would have been a real shame to have missed out on hearing these fantastic live versions from newer recordings. And hopefully, they'll release live versions of the next ten - no, make it thirty - albums that they record too. Long live My Morning Jacket.
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