Something’s probably ruined somewhere but I’m still too bemused by the lyrics video to pay much mind…
[Video][Website]
[4.57]
Josh Love: Like fellow Southerners R.E.M., My Morning Jacket is generally at its best when at its most inscrutable, when frontman Jim James’ reverb-laden moan burrows into the band’s woolly grooves and the overwhelming effect transcends sense. At their worst MMJ is just a slightly more muscular Fleet Foxes, and here James makes the mistake of giving himself nowhere to hide. “You’re sweet and sincere / But so ruled by fear” is the kind of soul-sucking pap a person usually tells you just before they try and get you to join a cult. In that sense I guess James’ cornpone delivery of some of these lines is a mild saving grace, as it suggests he’s not even buying what he’s selling.
[3]
Alfred Soto: You Are the Quarry is an odd antecedent, but I’m such an asshole that when Jim James sings “I’m gettin’ so tired of tryin’ to be nice” over fuzz and what-the-fuck pedal steel I wonder why he sounds like a CVS employee with a head cold. Anyway, this song isn’t nice.
[5]
Micha Cavaseno: Jim James, the most generically named indie vocalist ever, has refined his billy goat’s bray with time, and MMJ are now so overtly smoothed out, you can’t even do anything to this single. It’s like listening to the slickness of 80s studio rock and knowing that for its time, everything has been roboticized to perfection. If this song could be turned into a resume, I’d be trying my best to turn mine into a decent impersonation of it: something cushy and far beyond my skillset. But resumes don’t just convince one to desire the person, just demonstrate effectiveness and quality.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: I can’t get past the official video being a visualizer, like this is Windows Media Player in 2003. It seems inadvertently a metaphor: pleasant to let happen in the background, but ultimately inconsequential.
[5]
Will Adams: It takes some time finding its legs (seriously, why the phrase extensions?), and the lyric is neither vague nor specific enough to mean much, but the faded copy reverb and curlicue pedal steel sweeten the deal.
[5]
Brad Shoup: Jim James’ phlegmatic tenor is something else, but it looks like the band caught what he’s got. Everything’s sickly and opaque, a hazy vision of a pop-rock gem, reliant on the pedal steel to color his particular vocal character. It still hits its marks eventually, but that’s granting an implied first person to the opening couplet.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: A really important moment for me, personally, over the last three years was taking a week of my life to go to New York and see all my old friends, and see that they were doing well but were still basically the same wonderful people I said goodbye to when I left America. I do the same thing with the music I used to listen to all the time, with more mixed results. Listening to “Big Decisions” is like catching up with a pal and realizing they’ve become too eager to settle into a boring life. Don’t you remember the spontaneous road trip? Those boozy late night soul spills? When we thought we were the American Radiohead? You changed, man.
[4]