My Morning Jacket - Chicago, IL

Jim James, sans guitar and parrot, posing like a bearded R&B mystic, braces his mic stand and belts out a chorus of howling chants and passionate spirit-calls to the murky beats of "Wordless Chorus."

The opening keys of "...Chorus" thumping from the dimly lit stage of the sold out Vic Theatre was a sure sign that this was a new My Morning Jacket. This was not the band entrenched in filling the room with an aura of whisky-drenched reverb from It Still Moves or the haunting croon-folk of At Dawn (though they would turn to some of that later in the show). This was a new My Morning Jacket. The innovators. My Morning Jacket, on the Z tour, were keyboards and tight pop-structures.

They made it apparent that this was the Z tour early on, playing the first three songs off of Z in succession to open up the concert, splashing a load of the just-released material throughout the set to a receptive crowd that were only able to get their ears on the new material scant weeks ago; the strongest live renditions of the new material were "What a Wonderful Man," and "Wordless Chorus."

MMJ bang out the It Still Moves tracks and let 'em rip, as they always do, with big-rockers like "One Big Holiday," "Mahgeetah," and "Run Thru," the last of which James teased the crowd with into the its crunching finality.

The pacing of the show seemed off, leaving the earlier material to get lost in the shuffle. "Xmas Curtain," and the rest of the At Dawn and Tennessee Fire tracks came off as downers and/or filler material in-between the It Still Moves bombast and the electro-tight-Z-beats.

MMJ soar on the It Still Moves songs, opening them up and exploding them on stage, making you want to go back to the albums and hear things that probably aren't there, the live improvisations of Z were sparse or non-existent on the Vic stage.

"Off the Record," is Z's most sprawling track, the one in which James pulls away from his microphone trick and uses his normal voice. Live, it is played straight to the vest, mimicked in every way to how it sounds on the record, complete with the same closing jam-fade. There was nothing new added to the live rendition that would make a concert goer rush back to the recording. There were none of the things that make a concert moment burn into your memory and make you ache to go back and see them again, either.

There was an opportunity on "Into the Woods" where MMJ could have torn the cover off the Vic with the buildup of M83-like swirling keyboards and floating orchestration, but the explosion of sound never came. Instead we got poet Thax Douglas and the Viking-clad roadies complete with pitchers of pilsner singing backup chorus.

My Morning Jacket is a pivotal band, coming off their most well-received and innovative record in Z. It's one of the highest rated albums on the net this year, and received a full four-star review from Static. While it's a gem, It Still Moves is still the soul of their live act. Let's hope My Morning Jacket are still shuffling through their set list and reworking the new material to make it fit, because this Vic show was far from the great shows of the band's past.