Review Summary: No climbing over the railing.
The Waterfall is a gorgeous record, but rarely is it a gripping one. Like the bucolic landscape its cover suggests, My Morning Jacket’s seventh record sounds rustic and lived in, its parts taking liberally from all the peaks and valleys of the band’s discography and coming away with a fitting snapshot of where the band is today. Frontman and force of nature Jim James has said in the publicity tour leading up to this record that the past few years have left him spent, injured, and generally more than cognizable of the fact that middle age is inching uncomfortably close for a man with a penchant for hard touring and detonating relationships. It makes sense, then, that his first return to My Morning Jacket since 2011’s lackluster
Circuital feels expansive and confident, well stocked with fresh ideas and James’ trademark pipes, marinated in reverb and still in fine form. It’s the band’s best collection of songs since 2005’s landmark
Z, yet it suffers from the same problem both
Circuital and 2008’s
Evil Urges dealt with: a lack of immediacy, of vitality, of My Morning Jacket really coming through the speakers to grab you like they do so easily in person. You want
The Waterfall to crash and geyser, to whip you around in a frenzy and lose you in a torrent. More often than not, though, you get the world’s prettiest lazy river ride.
The initial signs are promising enough. For all the childish wonder that bogs down James’ lyrics – and James’ lyrics have hardly ever been a make-or-break point for MMJ – “Believe (Nobody Knows)” is thrilling, building a sense of anticipation and catharsis that uses that punchy guitar riff to delightfully restrained effect. “Compound Fracture,” meanwhile, takes more after the band’s latter era with its James’ neo-soul affectations and a sleek keyboard tone that sounds simultaneously dated and smoothly modern. Where earlier attempts at this sound often had My Morning Jacket coming off as caricatures of themselves, “Compound Fracture” and its woozier cousin, the psychedelic soul number “Thin Line,” sound like My Morning Jacket in their happy place, seamlessly marrying the twang of their earlier records with a funky, genre-ambiguous songwriting soup.
The band is talented enough to pull these tracks off, but
The Waterfall’s fatal flaw is in the record’s pacing. Simply put, these are songs that tend to just glide by, lovely but somewhat insubstantial. When the band’s trademark guitar histrionics make a brief cameo at the end of “Thin Line,” or, better yet, when the deadly dull “Tropics (Erase Traces)” is rescued by the gnarliest, most wrenching guitar solo the band has allowed all record, you’re practically snapped out of a reverie. It’s a beautiful slumber, though. “Like a River” is almost mystical in its winding progressions and James’ haunting falsetto, no matter that one can hardly understand what he’s saying (there’s a sort of woodsman charm to that). “Get the Point” is, in its spartan arrangement and James’ plaintive, resigned lyrics, happily straightforward and the logical midpoint of a record that tends to swell over its banks more often than not. It’s a song that breaks no new ground, but with as talented a songwriting team as My Morning Jacket is, new ground is almost superfluous.
It’s a lesson that I wish could have been applied to
The Waterfall as a whole. While its explorations are deft and assured, there doesn’t seem to be much at stake. For all of James’ personal turmoil, rarely does he ever come across as more than totally in command, an admirable trait but one that drags down much of
The Waterfall to both a lyrical and sonic sameness. There’s some reassurance in that many of the more aimless songs sound like they would translate far better to the band’s true home on the stage, but here they qualify more as two-dimensional portraits. The hectic production and hints of self-doubt that James delivers on “Spring (Among the Living”) is a welcome bit of dirt on a record that sounds too big to fail, as is the hint of scratching strain that James screams out on the chorus to “Big Decisions.” Instead, the record closes with “Only Memories Remain,” a breakup song that doubles as a meandering, blissfully unhurried narcotic. It feels like drowning, but My Morning Jacket’s idealized version of it, sinking into a peaceful slumber soundtracked by delicate guitar noodling and the falsetto of a god, but it’s all wrong; drowning should be visceral and violent, all struggle and gasps. But of course that wouldn’t work on
The Waterfall. It’s a record that feels too much like a dream to draw any real blood.
