My Morning Jacket "Z" [2005]

There was a terrible but ultimately forgettable time in recent music history when girly falsettos from guys fronting indie bands were all the rage; they all thought they were combining Brian Wilson with Prince, but all they actually accomplished was James Blunt without the airplay. My Morning Jacket are about as guilty you can get of delving into this failed conceit, but even worse -- on "Z" they are trying to summon the bedrock glumness of Radiohead, but can't seem to get anywhere deeper than "mildly bummed out." So they settle for pseudo-scholarly subject matter and even pseudo-er late-era U2 production bombast. Actually, their desperation is pretty scattershot; they even stoop to trying to sound like The Who, a band that hadn't had any integrity for 25 years by the time "Z" was released. This indicates to me two things: 1) Classic rock must die forever, lest every new rock band keep returning there, and 2) Bands like My Morning Jacket will forever be doomed by their own idiocy if they think things like "classic rock" are destined to revisit nondescript musical eras like the mid-2000s.