By: David Schultz

My Morning Jacket has reached the stage of buzziness where they can simply do no wrong. Lauded in nearly every musical circle for the last couple of years, My Morning Jacket has killed at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival with a 3½ hour midnight set, brought crowds to the arena early during their summer stint opening act for Pearl Jam and have had fellow rockers Grace Potter & The Nocturnals running ragged to catch them play over the summer. All windows of immunity someday close, usually with an accompanying backlash. For My Morning Jacket, still riding the critical and commercial success of their 2005 release Z, that time has not yet come; nor does it seem imminent. Sometimes the world works out right.

MMJ have owed a visit to the Big Apple for quite some time. Due to complications from pneumonia befalling lead singer and guitarist Jim James, the Louisville, Kentucky rockers had to bail out of their last scheduled appearance, a New Year's Eve show at Madison Square Garden with the Black Crowes and North Mississippi AllStars. They made the most of their return by quickly selling out the roomy Roseland Ballroom. Unlike some other sold-out shows at the venue, Roseland felt sold-out: on the outside, the scalpers seemed a bit more prevalent and a lot more confident in their ability to unload extras; on the inside, the standing room - a little more claustrophobic, the beer lines - a little lengthier, the balconies and raised side stage - a little more populated.

Entrancing on record, My Morning Jacket are equally captivating on stage. Casting ominous silhouettes behind a gigantic translucent screen, the band opened the show appearing larger than life, easing into their opener, "One Big Holiday." A flute away from looking like Ian Anderson, Jim James was the focal point of the show; the crowd hanging on his every movement while he bounced, loped and swayed across the stage. While lead singers and front men always garner the most attention, they are nothing without a quality band behind them. Along with James, charter members Patrick Hallahan (drums) and Two-Tone Tommy (bass) and relatively recent additions Carl Broemel (guitar) and Bo Koster (keys) create an intriguing mix of sleepy psychedelia and dreamy blues. James' haunting voice deftly creates the same aura as Neil Young, giving a doleful feel to surreal carnivalesque dirges that call to mind Robbie Robertson and The Band. On "Off The Record" they incorporate a reggae beat before devolving into a seventies-era Stones groove. Going back even farther, their set closer, "They Ran," adhered to the more restrictive structure of the sixties soul standards, relying on James' vocals to convey the song's power.

On some level, MMJ look like a raw, hairy group of savages but there's a lot of finesse to the songs, especially how they play them. When they jammed, they met at the drum stand, much like Pearl Jam used to do in their formative years. Playing off each other as well as playing with each other, James and Broemel used Two-Tone's rumbling bass to take "Dondante" to lofty dimensions. During the relatively sedate encore, capped by impassioned if not hurried runs through "Mahgeetah" and "Anytime," Broemel showed true versatility. Remaining primarily on guitar for the main set, he contributed heavily to the country-blues feel: beginning the encore on the pedal steel guitar accompanying James on a duet of "Tonight I Want To Celebrate With You" and then breaking out the saxophone for "Nashville To Kentucky."

The cavernous Roseland Ballroom, which doesn't always provide the best acoustics, was not the best match for My Morning Jacket's straightforward style. On the surface, it felt that some intangible was missing from the performance. However, My Morning Jacket doesn't lack passion, they don't lack skill, they don't lack for quality songs and they surely don't lack for a mighty crowd response. Rather, the nagging feeling resulted from the fact that MMJ's gimmick-free style of playing each song as hard as they can didn't belong in a ballroom, they belonged in a much larger arena.

Labels: My Morning Jacket