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My Morning Jacket - "Z" - due October 4, 2005

Tracklisting:

1 Wordless Chorus
2 It Beats For You
3 Gideon
4 What a Wonderful Man
5 Off the Record
6 Into the Woods
7 Anytime
8 Lay Low
9 Knot Comes Loose
10 Dondante

I picked up It Still Moves due to the acclaim it got and a few good songs I had heard but I was underwhelmed with the album as a whole. Anybody hear this yet?

Hollowgen

if they can top or match "At Dawn", i'm in. otherwise, i'll pass on something like It Still Moves.

TropicalRobot

And I'm hoping it just lives up to It Still Moves. Yes it's a bit bloated, but most bands go through their entire careers without writing even one song as towering and classic as "One Big Holiday", "Mahgeetah" or "Run Thru". Admittedly, I just got into the band this year and worked backwards from It Still Moves and while the first two are damn good records, It Still Moves to me is the Great Leap Forward they needed to make. Hopefully Z continues in that vein.

Z has leaked and can be found out there, according to discussion on the MMJ website. Most fans seem pretty impressed. I will wait for the real deal.

Hiro11

IMO, this is their best album.

It's much tighter than "It Still Moves" but retains the epic structure of that album. The songs are uniformly well constructed, they also vary quite a bit. This album also sounds great: each song has interesting arrangements and the engineering is fantastic (after listening to the non-stop monotone blast of albums like Franz Ferdinand's latest, it's great to hear an album with a little more subtlety to the mix).

This album is like a combination of late Steely Dan, Flaming Lips, Drive By Truckers and Wilco. If I had to put a label on it, I'd say "Modern Psychedelic Americana".

It's a top-five-of-the-year album to me.

wendersfan

It Still Moves was my album of the year, whatever year it came out. If this is better then it's gotta be on the shortlist of album of the decade.

cfloyd3

There already was a topic on Z which I commented in but this is at the top here so I will comment again. I saw them live for the second time (front row once again, this time right in front of Jim James) on the 7th and it was the best show I have ever seen. They just rock your ass off and you have a good time letting them do it. The crowd was great and so was the energy in there. It is common to say but the only way to experience MMJ is live, the songs from the album when they perform on stage (like Wordless Chorus) really just rock hard and aren't as laid back which I think helps it.

Z is great as expected, Into the Woods and Lay Low would probably be my choice favorites to go along with the 'epic' Dondante. They played Lay Low and Dondante live and it was pretty awesome. I really recommend if they are playing ever near you that you make an effort to see them. It is difficult to put into words but when you see them live you really do go somewhere else. The fact your whole body seems like it is going to vibrate in half just disappears and you find yourself in there just rocking out. They are a great band which I am proud to say I have seen, now 2 times.

If you just got into them give their other albums a chance like Tennessee Fire and At Dawn, they are beautiful.