O’Brien, though, has rarely been a reinvent-your-band guy. Rage’s Evil Empire, Bruce’s The Rising, Train’s Drops of Jupiter: He is a producer who helps a veteran act streamline and resurface its sound for the major label hoping to recoup his fee. That is mostly what happens on is, where the exploratory excesses of a quarter-century get slimmed into 10 songs that never break the five-minute mark and don’t collectively crack 40 minutes. From the squiggly disco-rock of “Die for It” to the Motown swerve of “I Can Hear Your Love,” these cuts are uniformly loud, all levels boosted as if My Morning Jacket—at their most absorbing when they were ultra-dynamic, their albums like particularly dramatic roller-coasters—were locked in a loudness war with their past.
The musical eccentricity that made even the most maddening My Morning Jacket records interesting has been tucked squarely into the corners, too, or used as onramps to get somewhere bigger, flashier, more emphatic, more predictable. The piano reverie and cavernous James vocal that begin “Time Waited,” for instance, are tender, beautiful, and curious. They ultimately become building blocks for a song so plodding and massive you half-expect Train’s Pat Monahan to ad lib something about deep-fried chicken. O’Brien plays the part of the algorithmic hall monitor here, making sure these songs slide into separate streams without any interruption.
At least is preserves the My Morning Jacket tradition of boasting an incredible opener, a song that reaffirms how life-affirming this band can actually be. “Out in the Open” rises through a choir of static to find James alone and stranded and scared, nylon-stringed guitar and an insistent rhythm goading him forward. “In the light of the sun/the waters run,” James sings in the refrain, the kind of hackneyed line he’s forever been able to turn into scripture through sheer charm. He stretches the last words until they link, caught together in perpetual motion. O’Brien smartly punches up the track, adding the sort of dramatic accents that make it feel like a prime E Street triumph.
My Morning Jacket doesn’t heed its own song’s call for personal liberation, though. The remaining nine songs fill the requisite slots of a My Morning Jacket album in 2025—the psych-soul slab of “Half a Lifetime,” the slow-build climax and cut-and-paste guitar heroics of “Beginning from the Ending,” the country-gothic mystique of a closer about rambling on, “River Road.” Their parts are so neatly scripted they often sound like plug-ins, from the stock riff that snakes through “Half a Lifetime” to the up-tempo shuffle that serves as the foundation of “Lemme Know.” It’s as if O’Brien set out to make the paragon of a modern My Morning Jacket album and succeeded in both style and sound, only forgetting to leave room for the surprises that actually gave their early works ineffable power. It’s boring.
