Live performance Assessment: My Morning Jacket — An Night of Thriller, Magic, and Murk

By Paul Robicheau

The veteran band from Louisville, Kentucky, kicked into the millennium with a wild and woolly mixture of Southern rock, alt-country, space-prog, and electro-funk that grew weirder over time.

My Morning Jacket stays an anomaly in 2022, in fashion and standing. The veteran band from Louisville, Kentucky, kicked into the millennium with a wild and woolly mixture of Southern rock, alt-country, space-prog, and electro-funk that grew weirder over time, matched by an more and more sporadic historical past of recording and touring.

The band’s live performance at Chief Financial institution Pavilion on Thursday marked its first Boston look in seven years. Positive, that features the pandemic, which didn’t assist safe a reception for 2021’s sometimes expansive, eponymous My Morning Jacket, the group’s first album of newly recorded materials in six years. On a cool evening on the 5,000-capacity harborside tent, there have been loads of empty rows within the again.

My Morning Jacket nonetheless made up for misplaced time, representing all 9 of its studio albums throughout two-and-a-quarter hours – on a tour that modifications up the music listing each evening in a manner that may thrill diehards however depart the uninitiated with only a style from the handful of what might be vaguely definable as MMJ’s “hits.” To be sincere although, the group’s hottest songs haven’t at all times been their finest, often simply opening tracks to albums the place higher materials adopted.

The quintet rocked in a blur of shaggy-haired headbanging and indirect, energetic backlights, a sonic and visible assault that emerged in a gap salvo of deep cuts “Wasted,” “Anytime” and “X-Mas Curtain” to each theatrical and obtuse impact. The sound and temper quickly lightened with singer/guitarist Jim James’ open-hearted positivity within the new “Fortunate to Be Alive,” the acoustic-led nugget “Golden” (sweetened by guitar foil Carl Broemel’s pedal metal) and “I’m Amazed.” Songwriter James instructed the gang of the meditative pleasure he present in strolling the waterfront to rediscover his favourite native church, Our Woman of Good Voyage.

From there, MMJ once more was off and operating by itself loopy voyage with a tightly riffed “Complicated” (capped by a recording of the brand new album’s slowed-down coda) and the funkily psychedelic “Holdin’ on to Black Steel.” The journey wound by the jaunty “Off the Document,” the swirling “Contact Me I’m Going to Scream, Half 2,” and the comparatively saccharine stretch  of“Really feel You” as songs predictably started in subdued territory and constructed to spacey jams that nodded to Pink Floyd. Coincidentally, MMJ served as Floyd architect Roger Waters’ backing band on the 2015 Newport Folks Competition.

Broemel’s darkish slide oozed into “I Assume I’m Going to Hell” (the evening’s deepest observe from 1999’s MMJ debut The Tennessee Hearth) earlier than he cued the teasing riff of “Run Via,” a monster set-closer that recalled how Neil Younger’s Loopy Horse would seal reveals with “Cortez the Killer.” The crunch of Broemel and James’ intertwined guitars led to a fierce breakdown by powerhouse drummer Patrick Hallahan (elevating his sticks with robotic jerks as if to imitate strobe lights), bassist Tom Blankenship and Berklee-bred keyboardist Bo Koster. Then all of it crashed to silence, solely to be resurrected by that scrumptious, stuttered riff.

The encore started with the follow-up punch of “One Huge Vacation,” the band’s best-known rave-up, from its hi-hat/bass throb and biking guitar harmonies to full-on thrash. The pastoral prog of “Spring (Among the many Dwelling)” and electro-soul romp “Wordless Refrain” (the place James labored his merry prairie howl underneath a mirror ball) appeared like an anticlimax after “One Huge Vacation.” However, “Wordless Refrain” was possible a extra recognizable, accessible tune to some within the viewers. And on an evening that shook the senses with thriller, majesty and murk, that additionally made it a becoming bow.

Paul Robicheau served greater than 20 years as contributing editor for music on the Improper Bostonian along with writing and pictures for the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and lots of different publications. He was additionally the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.