Music Library: My Morning Jacket, My Teenage Stride, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Mystick Crewe of Clearlight

My Morning Jacket - The Tennessee Fire (1999), Does Xmas Fiasco Style (2000), At Dawn (2001), Chocolate And Ice EP (2001), My Morning Jacket/Songs: Ohia Split (2001), It Still Moves (2003), Z (2005), and Okonokos (2006).  Here is an example of a band ruined by their own success.  The first two MMJ albums, Tennessee Fire and At Dawn, are creative and adventurous alt-country.  The EPs from that period are sort of lackluster, though.  It Still Moves, though, heralds an interesting twist: it is as if the band has become bored with their own predictability.  There's a few great songs, but the rest sound as much like filler as the EPs from 2000 and 2001.  On Z, the band tried something interesting by adopting a more Flaming Lips-like psychedelic indie-rock sound, which pretty well worked for them.  Okonokos is a pretty good live album, too, and that's from a guy who often hates live albums.  I picked up the 2008 follow-up Evil Urges when it came out, but it is seriously awful and I got rid of it.  While these guys do alt-countryish indie-rock well, they do not do Prince with anything approaching skill.  I will likely not follow them any longer.

My Teenage Stride - Ears Like Golden Bats (2007) and Lesser Demons EP (2008).  I downloaded Ears Like Golden Bats on a lark and was blown away.  I mean, there's nothing groundbreaking here.  In fact, MTS might as well be a Clean cover band.  But dammit, they are a hell of a Clean cover band, and Ears Like Golden Bats was one of my favorite albums of that year.  Lesser Demons is also pretty good, although not quite up to the heights of its predecessor.   

Mystery Science Theater 3000 - "A Patrick Swayze Christmas." On one of the very few Xmas anthems with a fight sequence (there's one in the little-heard fourth verse of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," too), Joel Hodgson and the robots remind us that Road House can have ye olde yuletide spirit, too. I missed this during the Xmas song round up of 2009 somehow.

The Mystick Krewe Of Clearlight - The Mystick Krewe Of Clearlight (2000).  Instrumental doom metal meets New Orleans funk.  It shouldn't work as well as it does, but there's something pretty enjoyable about this album.

And this concludes the Ms!  I started them last June and they just dragged on and on, mostly because of I started to feel bogged down by this project.  Moving cross-country is stressful, especially since I've been more or less unemployed since leaving Texas (minus an 8-week stint rich in embarrassments that I will never, ever mention again).  To be fair, I finished the Mystick Krewe Of Clearlight back in early February and have been playing catch-up since then.  Before I launch into the Ns, I will be try to run through some of the untimely acquisitions I've picked up in the nine months that this blog has spent on the Ms, but only briefly.