By Jared Cobb
Somewhere a shower drain weeps. Just outside the sold-out Cotton Club on this rainy Saturday night sits a grumbling tour bus and inside that bus stands a sobbing shower clogged to the hilt with the long frizzy hairs of My Morning Jacket. Luckily, the band isn’t there to witness it. They’re about to take the stage and put their hair to work for an anxious capacity crowd.
Lush trippy power chords and stomping washy drums instantly expand the dank, depressed venue walls as MMJ bursts onto the stage in a flurry of ‘fro and flying V’s. Just when the sound is as big as it can get, Jim James steps to the mike and bellows that vast Grand Canyon croon that crawls up your spine and rattles your brain and tries to make your hair emulate his. You want to dance but you’d rather watch and, besides, a sound this big doesn’t share the floor well.
While they’ve made a couple personnel changes – Carl Broemel (guitar) and Bo Koster (keyboards) replace the departed Cash and Quaid – these MMJ reverb addicts remain the best Country / Rock / Metal / Psychedelic / Americana / Hair / Alt. Whatever band since, uh … hmm. Well, they’re really good.
Unfortunately, for every great headlining band there are fifty horrible opening acts and The Thrills nearly had the Cotton Club cleared out before MMJ even had the chance to rescue us. These dullards from Dublin, Ireland apparently think they’re a brilliant Strokes / U2 hybrid, but they’re selling crap that we ain’t buying. By the end of their comically vivacious set, we had developed a hateful disdain of Ashton-Kutcherian proportion for these gimmicky posers. Stay away.
Kicking the night off was the strum-and-hum of a gifted and unaccompanied Patrick Park. Part Dylan, part Denver, part Yorn, Park can bend a song with the best of them. Loneliness is the central theme here. Hell, it’s even in his CD title: Loneliness Knows My Name, and he lives it alone – the solitary standalone on a stage cluttered with the night’s anticipation. His storyline songs are utterly void of hooks, which play nicely on CD but will keep him from stealing the show tonight.
www.thethrills.com
www.mymorningjacket.com
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