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My Morning Jacket to warm up UI Recreation Building

By John Kenyon

What began as a band with one very powerful asset has evolved into one with seemingly limitless possibilities. That’s both good and bad.

The first two albums from Kentucky’s My Morning Jacket – Tennessee Fire and At Dawn – were filled with good to great songs that blended Southern boogie rock, folk and alt-country, all driven by the reverb-soaked vocals of band leader Jim James. The songs were good, and James was better, elevating everything touched by his angelic pipes.

Its major label debut, It Still Moves, showed some signs of growth while also dipping a toe in jam band waters. It was a refinement of what came before, but no indication of what was to come. Perhaps sensing the limitations of its sound, the band took a hard left turn with its next album, Z. While it still sounded like a My Morning Jacket record, its infusion of funk, reggae, dub and progressive rock was a revelation. Heretofore incongruous sounds blended seamlessly on this masterpiece of a disc.

Then came this year’s Evil Urges, a disc that pushed the band’s sound even further away from its roots. The title track felt like some odd backwoods Prince composition, while “Highly Suspicious” seemed to recreate everything wrong with ’80s music: “Hey, look at all of these buttons! I wonder what they do,” you can just hear the band eagerly exclaim in the studio.

At the same time, the disc includes songs that feel like a logical progression from It Still Moves, as if the adventurousness of Z had never taken place. It’s a strange and somewhat off-putting blend. While the band has proven it can tackle nearly anything and succeed, that qualifier – “nearly” – is required given the missteps here.

Still, live the band is transcendent, James leading one of the best combos in the business. A live show that features tracks cherry picked from the band’s entire back catalog could lead to some head-snapping juxtapositions, but ultimately ought to testify to the power and potential evident from the beginning. And perhaps it will signal where the band will head next.

The band plays Tuesday at the University of Iowa Recreation Building, located just northwest of Kinnick Stadium at 930 Stadium Drive. Parking for the event is available in either the stadium parking lot or the surrounding hospital parking ramps.

The show is presented by the University of Iowa’s student-run SCOPE Productions, which has traditionally hosted shows at the Iowa Memorial Union but was forced to find an alternative location after the June flooding.

“There aren’t too many places that have the exact capacity that we wanted, but we found out the Recreation Building is great, it holds about 2,000 people,” says Clark Bradshaw, SCOPE’s public relations marketing coordinator. “It’s exactly what we wanted. It’s our first concert over there.”

General admission tickets, $34, are still available at (319) 363-1888 and all Ticketmaster outlets. A portion of each ticket sale will go toward flood relief.