It is a blight on Melbourne society that My Morning Jacket is not sold out. It boggles the mind that Jim James does not sell out The Palace when Aqua and The Vengaboys are selling out shows across the country. But let’s not be judgemental. Dawes entered the stage to a silent audience, you could hear a lone clap ring out and it was almost embarrassing. Thankfully, the crowd fills out significantly over the course of their better-than-Augie-March 45 minute folk set and with it the confidence of the band on stage soars.
The Los Angeles four-piece are both humble and excitable, speaking with bewilderment at their opportunity to play in Melbourne and to open for their heroes. They are instantly loveable chaps and it is testament to the quality of their Fleet Foxed harmonies that there is already a line at the merchandise booth to buy Dawes t-shirts when the punters could be in the line for the bar. Deservedly, what started with a lonely clap upon entrance finishes with a roaring applause upon exit, having won over a Melbourne crowd that was increasingly looking like the clientele of Lentils As Anything.
The smooth jazz beep-bop of Bo Derek filled in the changeover time and the amount of Southern gents in the crowd with pleated shirts, blue jeans and on-the-ranch boots were steadily increasing. People were eagerly pushing past others vying for viewpoints but even in this act there was a certain gentleman-like respect shown as people turned around to ask if others could still see the band before sharing a masculine handshake for no particular reason. Jim walks on stage to a rapturous applause. This is because his fans are not fans, they are cult-members, such is the devotion to this band from their following that if the band started handing out cups of Kool-Aid between songs, we would’ve had a massacre on our hands and this would’ve been a very different review.
The man himself can only be described as hobo chic, Eddie Vedder circa 1991 hair, Jim launches into “Victory Dance.” The fact that the vocals are so angelic creates quite a juxtaposition with the fact that the entire band look like they haven’t showered in days and guitarist Carl Broemel is actually the spitting image for The Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. “Circuital” quickly follows the opener and it is a clear sign of confidence in their new record that they open the concert brimming with it’s goodness.
“I’m Amazed”, the sole track to be aired from Evil Urges is straight-up Lynyrd Skynyrd, but Lynyrd wished they sounded this Alabamian. Is that a word? Anyway, at this point it starts becoming the slightest bit awkward purely because we haven’t heard boo peep from our Kentucky boys yet and it would be seven songs into the concert before the crowd received any acknowledgement of their existence within the confines of the old Metro.
As well as the band was playing, and they were playing flawlessly, it was hard not to feel a bit neglected. Are we just another date in the schedule to them? Is Jim cheating on us? Nervous Betty Draper thoughts aside, the lack of love from the band was palpable, the crowd were becoming more fidgety and as much as they were doing their best to pump out folk tinged psychedelica, it counts for nothing without a “Hello, we’re My Morning Jacket, we want to move to Melbourne blah blah blah…”
Ironically, when we finally did get a greeting the man wouldn’t shut up. The muffled talk/growl of Jim James turned into a monologue and after waffling on like grandad about god knows what, he finally picked up his guitar, placed a ridiculous looking towel on his sweat-soaked head and started “Off The Record” from their magnificent album Z. But in a gig that was not without its oddities the band freezes frame mid-song, and just one note before finishing the track just stops and holds pose, like Han Solo frozen in carbonate. The entire band did this for over a minute and a minute doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but when watching a band stand perfectly still on stage, one minute is an hour.
Their set list was eclectic and brilliant in its depth and breadth of sound, morphing the band from country twanged folk troubadours to Tom Waits inspired howling rock monsters, with Jim and Carl shredding guitars against one another as Jim whipped his hair back and forth harder than Willow Smith. But My Morning Jacket are at their best when they are at their most progressive with guitars intertwining and folked up feedback and fuzz drowning and melting their sound together to form vicious codas, something they nailed on “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream (Part 2)”. When they do this they are inches away from stealing the crowns from Crosby, Stills and Nash; at their most mundane they sound like UB40.
Finishing the set with the sprawling “Gideon”, Jim puts on a luminescent, vocoder-attached black coat/hood/habit, completing the hobo look in celebration of one of their most accomplished pieces of music. The song finishes in a key drenched crescendo and guitar cacophony that if one were on some half decent acid would have made them feel like the world was ending. The audience mourn the band leaving the stage with stomping, cheering, clapping and basically making any other noise that could be made to prompt the return of the eccentric frontman.
Unsurprisingly, “Wordless Chorus”, the first song of encore, gets the loudest reception of the night with the crowd erupting in shared acknowledgement. It is an amazing pop song and very similar to the art-pop of TV On The Radio. “First Light” saw Carl break out the sax. Where had that been hiding all night? Sacrilege! It is a well known fact that a saxophone solo turns a good track into a great track instantly. Closing with “One Big Holiday” the poetry of it all was apt, with a riff that is maybe a little too similar to “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC, the gig, running close to three hours long ends with a blues wig out of Zappa proportions.
My Morning Jacket make one thing clear, when they rock, they rock hard, like Josh Homme hard. Jim enjoys finger-picking his acoustic but there are enough flourishes of guitar to see there is a Jimmy Page lurking underneath. Folk bands are not supposed to end their sets by throttling their guitars, which is exactly why My Morning Jacket is better than any folk band on this planet.
– Chris Lewis
