My Morning Jacket - Okonokos

London, UK (Sony BMG Music Entertainment UK) - My Morning Jacket release a glorious double CD on October 2nd.
Okonokos is a live album, a concert movie, an imaginary place– the setting for the ideal My Morning Jacket concert.

"We dressed stage with lots of leaves, tried to make it look like a forest," remembers Jim, "and built a little story through the movie, so there's a narrative continuing along. I don't wanna give too much away, I'd rather people saw it themselves. But we didn't want to do 'My Morning Jacket: Live at The Fillmore', or 'Live at Shepherd's Bush'. We wanted to make it mysterious; it's not about a time, or a place, it's about us playing music, somewhere!"

And what music... Okonokos is like My Morning Jacket sat down and played the perfect gig, just for you, with a setlist that'll charm new fans and the hardcore equally. Lowdown is giddily ecstatic, Jim's voice and the twin-guitars chiming in unison. Run Through stretches its arcing Zeppelin riffs out to a floor-shaking ten minutes, it's mid-song drum'n'bass breakdown a highlight of every 'Jacket show. The desolate Dondante similarly draws its drama out past ten minutes, Jim's ghostly verses giving way to a guitar solo that challenges Neil Young's Like A Hurricane for sorrowful eloquence. And a piano-wrecking, road-ragged stomp through the head-banging country-rock of Dancefloors shows that the stage inspires My Morning Jacket to always take their beloved songs somewhere else.
"We really go for it in the studio," Jim laughs, "But it's nice to open the songs up, when we're playing them live. When we watched the footage back for the first time, we were just amazed we lived through it: we filmed right at the end of a long tour, we were all getting sick, we were fuckin' slaughtered! A couple of songs stretched past the ten minute mark there, and they're my favourite versions of those songs, better than the album versions."