Music: Review

My Morning Jacket's new album, It Still Moves, provides more fodder for a well-worn comparison. The Louisville country-rock quintet has been likened to Neil Young for years, since their 1999 acclaimed debut LP, The Tennessee Fire; and MMJ singer/songwriter Jim James resembles the Crazy Horse frontman in two essential ways on It Still Moves: his ability to endow simple lyrics with harsh and powerful intensity, and his tendency to surround his simple brilliance with pretension that, simply put, sounds silly.

Unfortunately, James does not have Young's ability to let his good songs outweigh or outnumber his bad. It Still Moves features a handful of solid songs that competently assume their places along the spectrum from soft country and folk tunes to headbanging rockers. The simple and plaintive love song "Just One Thing" uses harmony in the chorus to contrast with James' strangely appealing verses.

"Masterplan" represents the other end of the spectrum, an unsophisticated but well-executed bar-band song with simple lyrics and an unrelenting beat. The lyrics sound like something Bob Dylan might have discarded in the 1970s: "I've got a master plan babe/ I been working on it from the start/ Just because it starts off simple/ Doesn't mean it don't have a heart."

Fittingly, the best song on the album is neither entirely country nor entirely rock-n-roll; rather, it is "Dancefloors," a jubilant tune that begins with dark imagery of nightjails and poolhalls. The lyrics soon give way to a three-minute instrumental outro where keyboardist Danny Cash and guitarist Johnny Quaid coalesce to give us the greatest moment on the album.

What is a virtue on "Dancefloors," however, proves to be the downfall of the rest of It Still Moves. Intros, outros and shifting from hard rock to folk-style music make each song indistinguishable from the next and elongate what might have been a brilliant EP into a sagging and lukewarm album. My Morning Jacket has some great music in the future. But after It Still Moves, it appears that most of that great music is still in the future.