![]() This interview, conducted during the band's current tour, went pretty well considering the fans-should-never-meet-artists shenanigans that plagued the interviews I used to do for a small paper. ![]() At another he was barefoot in a tie-dyed muumuu.Īnd what's with all the dark songwriters voicing such cheer outside their songs? Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock, who's penned many a sociopathic verse, explains in the current issue of Bookforum how reading John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath made him "want to be kind to people." Jim James has a similar thing happening: after closing one album shuddering, "I think I'm going to hell," and opening the next one yelping, "All your life is obscene," he actually presents himself as gleeful and willing to praise Mom, Disney, and love. He can be confounding: at one show he put a sort of stuffed buffalo puppet head on the mike, draped his hair around it, and sang 'through' it. He can be hilarious: when playing at a club beside a club where the Genitorturers were playing, he deadpanned a public service announcement about how people shouldn't go around torturing people's genitals. Looking spacy, sweet and stout, he's a Manson-meets-the-Snuggle-Bear who could put you in a figure-four leglock. His eyes and grin seem naïve, but also convey that he might know something you don't, or be attuned to something you aren't. He's an immovable crooner one minute and a flailing headbanger the next. The five-piece's warm but desolate rock sounds like Sun sessions held on the moon, and Jim James' pipes, which seem to come from somewhere beyond himself, can make others' 'intimate' vocals seem like stilted Merchant-Ivory performances. I hereby predict that this wholly unpretentious band will go the distance for you, figuratively and literally (their last album was 74 minutes and came with a long bonus disc of demos, and at 41 minutes, MMJ's last EP was longer than many bands' proper records). ![]() If you haven't yet sampled the earthy yet otherworldly reverbsploitation of Kentucky's My Morning Jacket, it's time.
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