2. It Still Moves (2003)

If the reverb of At Dawn suggested something haunting echoing out of the farthest reaches of the American frontier, the reverb of It Still Moves is lush, replacing fear with wonder. That’s fitting, because It Still Moves is a thing to behold. Just a touch shorter than At Dawn, the album feels twice as immense. It’s majestic almost throughout, crammed with one epic song after another. Not to depart too far from the premise of this article, but it must be said: at least half of the songs on It Still Moves remain absolute warhorses in their live shows, speaking to the hallowed place this record occupies amongst MMJ’s fanbase. This is totally based on experience and isn’t empirically demonstrable in any real way, but I feel It Still Moves may be the collective favorite of the MMJ fan community.

Rightfully so — this is likely the most essentially My Morning Jacket-esque album that My Morning Jacket has produced. As lengthy as this album and most of its songs are, everything feels integral, whether it’s the way “Mahgeetah” or “One Big Holiday” perpetually seem to have peaked, only to break into another brilliant guitar-hero moment, or the way the longer songs seem to demand their length. Speaking of those epic ones, there’s a lot of that here. Only “Just One Thing” is under four minutes; most hover around six; “I Will Sing You Songs” reaches the nine-minute mark while “Rollin’ Back” and “Steam Engine” linger between seven and eight. What’s incredible about these particular songs is the way MMJ achieves such a psychedelic sound with them with just guitars, unadorned by effects, and the power of James’ voice. In their own way, they create a world as distinct and strange as any of the more directly trippy stuff on Z. This is particularly true of “Steam Engine,” which might be the best and most quintessential MMJ song and — not to disparage “One In The Same” — should have closed It Still Moves.

Everything on It Still moves feels like the band is going all in, stitching every idea together to ensure absolute payoff at every turn. Perhaps as a result, this was the end of a certain version of MMJ. After It Still Moves, Johnny Quaid departed the band, and a lineup change resulted in a fundamentally different MMJ. As it stands, It Still Moves is the zenith of that first phase, the point to which everything was building and when it did, it was incredible.