Jim James is certainly prolific. There have been seven albums of resplendent melodies while fronting My Morning Jacket, his solo albums have careered from acoustic balladry and spacey disco to ghostly 1920s-style crooning, and he also joined Conor Oberst in Monsters of Folk. Throughout, he has not lost his trademark musical wonderment and transcendent, childlike nostalgia. However, here he tears up the plans and turns up the guitars for an unexpectedly playful album which rollicks between big-chorused bubblegum pop and crunching hard riffola. The hard-boogieing You Get to Rome echoes, implausibly, Status Quo’s Rockin’ All Over the World. There are Crazy Horses-style frazzled jams, audible guffaws and even, for heaven’s sakes, a yelled: “Let’s rock!”
Yet lurking within the seemingly carefree racket lies a giddily powerful response to these troubled times. Throwback’s wistful theme – “When we were young … All the potential in the world” – is cast against fears of the future. It’s one of his finest songs. The lovely, Fleetwood Mac-type ballad Secrets carries similar foreboding. Better Late Than Never and Over and Over are melodious songs in which empires fall but people “drop the same bombs, build the same walls”. Even the syrupy Too Good to Be True is laden with little barbs (“I never once believed that things could go so wrong / I guess I’ll leave it in a song”). His mix of musical joie de vivre and lyrical home truths prove fiendishly effective.
