For most bands, not knowing what they want to be is a problem. For My Morning Jacket, it’s an opportunity. The Louisville band refused to be tagged with any one label at Avalon on Saturday, dipping into aspects of arena rock, country, power pop, prog, heavy metal and reggae and melding them into a form of Americana space-rock.
It’s hard to hold such disparate elements together as a unified whole rather than a stitched-together hodgepodge, but the band pulled it off well. Too well, perhaps, as many of the songs followed the same structure, culminating in codas of lengthy soloing. If My Morning Jacket’s toolkit occasionally seemed limited, though, it was still effective, with “Lay Low” climaxing with hypnotic jamming and the speedy synth-bass midsection of “Run Thru” ending with a long, dramatic pause before guitarist Carl Broemel launched back into the song’s slow, screaming riff and singer Jim James started howling.
James’s reverb-coated voice was treated as just another instrument in the mix, with the hard-to-decipher lyrics often less important than the way he sang them. Possessed of a soft tenor that might not otherwise be noteworthy, the singer was eager to see what he could do with it, letting it follow its curious impulses on songs such as the Springsteen/Rundgren hybrid “What A Wonderful Man” and the aptly titled “Wordless Chorus.”
The latter song was performed in near-darkness until the chorus, when lights flickered above and behind the stage before dropping out again as the verse returned, and James later told the tech crew, “Keep the lights down” for a relaxed, extended cover of Bread’s “Make It With You.” Those were the only real moments of stagecraft, and James only rarely addressed the audience. Mostly, My Morning Jacket focused their energy into their material, allowing numbers like “Gideon,” with its sequencer-like guitar and unresolved drumbeat, to be simultaneously tighter and more spacious than on record.
Kathleen Edwards opened with a half-hour set drawn from her recent Back To Me, and she and her
hard-hitting band came across like Lucinda Williams and the
Heartbreakers. If Edwards didn’t possess Williams’s directness, she
added an urgency of her own, pushed on by Colin Cripps’s blazing, Neil
Young-like guitar playing.