Although I am not sure I can run with all that ‘it’s an enigma inside a riddle wrapped in a copy of yesterdays Sun’ malarkey the DVD Concert film that accompanies the recent ‘Okonokos’ release from Kentucky’s My Morning Jacket certainly defies the odds. Let’s face it, most things that exceed 30 minutes thesedays tend to lose our attention (the TV, the new Strokes album, the President’s address to the nation, sex etc) so when I looked at the cover and discovered that it was over two hours in length without so much as ice-cream interval to provide relief, I nearly fainted with consternation. How could this gang of straggly misfits with just four albums to their credit and only a couple that we’ve actually bought DARE to pitch a marathon few hours of mesmerising pop to a not altogether converted audience? Well they did and let that be this end of it, as this is likely do for indie what the Floyd’s Live At Pompeii did for progressive and what The Song Remains The Same did for heavy rock. Well okay, it probably won’t – but that shouldn’t take anything away from its achievements – as it’s a damn impressive set.
Mixed by Michael Bauer (Bob Dylan, Coldplay) and available in 5.1 Surround Sound the gargantuan illuminations were birthed in the backwoods of My Morning Jacket’s imagination. Inspired by a fairytale like performance in Tokyo, the band decided to prettify their mysterious set with the essence of an ancient forest, capturing a timeless, anonymous place that straddled the dimensions of the space and time continuum; the worlds of the real and surreal, the actual and the actual not. The film starts at the turn of the century and morphs into the band’s two-night stint at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore where they grapple heroically with a mind-blowing canon of work that includes ‘Off The Record’, ‘What A Wonderful Man’, ‘One Big Holiday’, ‘Lay Low’, ‘Steam Engine’ and ‘The Attack’.
Yes it’s monstrously overwrought, shamelessly hammy and no its not the same as being there. But it’s all the more magical for it.