My Morning Jacket - Okonokos [DVD] (DVD)

All Music Guide

A lot has been made of the =Okonokos DVD, My Morning Jacket's live concert film, recorded at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium (and which accompanies this doubledisc release separately). The live performance DVD is so seductive and powerful because of the lush backdrop set and wonderfully immediate manner in which it was shot as well as the music yet the double CD that accompanies it and the fourLP vinyl set on Badman Records of the same recording seem to get scant attention. Sure, they are mentioned, but somehow just as geegaws to accompany the DVD. Wrong. It all comes down to the music, after all, and the Louisville, KY, quintet gets that big time. It's why the CD was issued first and the DVD came later. The DVD should be seen; it's gorgeous, it's wild and woolly and beautiful all at once. But Okonokos the CD is one hell of a live record. Certainly, since it was recorded on the tour for the incredibly successful album Z, it concentrates on a lot of the band's more recent material.... But they dig deep, too, and go back to 1999's "I Think I'm Going to Hell" from The Tennessee Fire, as well as "The Way That He Sings"and "It Still Moves" from 2001's At Dawn, and "I Will Sing You Songs" and "Mahgeetah" from the It Still Moves disc in 2003 to close the entire show. There have been references to Neil Young Crazy Horse, in terms of how My Morning Jacket work as a band; don't believe it. My Morning Jacket have the spontaneity and raw wiry energy to be sure they don't try to cover the flubs but they're infinitely tighter than those loud garage yobs who believe that playing slower than cough syrup with codeine is a virtue (Crazy Horse stopped being a viable unit when Danny Whitten died; they're merely the contradictory and uneven backing band for Young because he's not ambitious enough to get a new one). Read more Less