My Morning Jacket, At Dawn/Tennessee Fire Demos Package

reviewed by dave heaton

These days My Morning Jacket is a hot-as-hell band, ripping down arenas everywhere they play. But even as they get tighter and more powerful with every passing day, like some kind of superhero, it’s still impossible to forget how stirring, how cut-through-your-soul pure Jim James’ voice is on its own. They can rock a stage up down and sideways, but what I’ll remember most is that moment for the encore where James came out with an acoustic guitar and killed it.

These demos for the band’s first two albums At Dawn and The Tennessee Fire -- some of them originally released with certain copies of the former album – showcase that side of the band. The glowing, healing, purty side of their music. The first proper track is James singing gorgeously over a loose, still-coming-together acoustic version of “The Way That He Sings” – the perfect beginning, with that immortal line, “why does my mind go to bits every time he plays that song? It’s the way that he sings.”

This “package”, with playful cover art, hits many of the most beautiful, pop moments from At Dawn (“Bermuda Highway”, “Hopefully”, “Lowdown”), and some of the bluesy ghostliness of that album and its less sublime but in some ways more mysterious predecessor, with a spacey, rough demeanor that still manages to be as majestic and overwhelming as the band’s most rocking moments, just in different ways. So many of the songs seem small but then hit you big…and one reason is that goddamn voice. It’d send chills up a dead man’s spine.

{www.darla.com}