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Life & Arts

Jacket DVD offers first live footage

Disc-ussion 

Austin Havican

Halloween is an interesting release day for music and DVDs and even more interesting for a group whose only other live album was, whether coincidentally or brilliantly marketed, recorded on Halloween a few years ago. My Morning Jacket's Okonokos double-disc live album has been out for about a month now, but its concert footage DVD release drops today. It is the visual companion to the live album that shares the same name and the band's first distributed concert footage and DVD.

To try and explain the name Okonokos is an impossible task; the title is a made-up representation of frontman and guitarist Jim James' objective artistic concept. The title is more of a question than anything and stays unanswered through the course of the film.

In a unique way, Okonokos is like a film. The start of the DVD opens with a candlelit party in an old Victorian-style home. A horse-drawn carriage pulls up and drops off a top-hatted and mustachioed guest, and he's ignored and scorned as he tries to make his rounds greeting the other partygoers. 

For some reason, his voice is inaudible despite his efforts at speech, and he is later mesmerized by the appearance of a large white alpaca. The two are mostly ignored, so they leave to go walk in the foggy woods. They see a bright white light and hear sounds alien to the melancholy forest, then find themselves inside the concert hall as My Morning Jacket begins "Wordless Chorus," the first song from its newest studio album.

The focus switches to a wide and slowly zooming shot of the theater: a huge concert hall completely filled to the balconies and decked out with chandeliers and moody lighting. 

The wall behind the stage is painted with tall dark tree trunks, and vines weave down and across the stage from all angles. Owls perch on the amplifiers and keyboards, and the band starts to move about the stage with its new song.

The DVD sounds incredible. It boasts Dolby Digital 5.1 Sound, but even the basic stereo setting sounds like a studio album. 

Concert DVDs are infamous for drawing attention to a band's inability to measure up to its talent in the studio, but even the thick reverb the band is famous for sounds crystal-clear. 

All too often, attendees of live recordings boast about the transcendence of quality of the live show versus its recorded presentation. However, the dozen or so cameras that follow each band member, wide shots of the stage, audience perspective shots and pans across the crowd take the viewer so much further than the concertgoer.

The changing lighting of cool colors and contrasted oranges washes each song a different way and adds to the crashing echo of the band's sound. When the energy is high and strobe lights are used smartly, the audience reciprocates and screams accordingly. The band's more ethereal alt-country songs featuring lap steels and heavy reverb are treated with shifting purples and greens, while the rolling ankle-high smoke helps write the myth of Okonokos.

The ornate and eerie indoor location, the mood and sounds of the Kentucky natives, and the absence of a credited venue add another mystery to the Okonokos performance: Where is it? A better question to ask is, does that matter?

Okonokos feels like a timeless performance. An impressive two hours of music is without band-to-audience banter, and the clothing the patrons are wearing mimics the transgenerational feel of the setting and its story. 

This adds to James' continual emphasis on wanting to create a lasting performance, and he does exactly that. 

The performance features mostly newer material from the band's 2005 release Z. About half of the 18 songs are from the band's other three albums, The Tennessee Fire (1999), At Dawn (2001) and It Still Moves (2003). 

As with anything, the DVD does have its weak points. The show concludes nicely, though somewhat abruptly, with the general everybody-do-whatever-with-your-instruments-all-at-once ending, but the movie keeps going. We rejoin the sometimes-mentioned party expatriate (named in the credits as "A. Man") and alpaca and leave the concert hall to walk back to the Victorian mansion. A large bear, presumably a reference to It Still Moves' and live EP Acoustic Citsuoca's cover art, attacks A. Man and dismembers him. The party witnesses this from indoors, and somehow the concert audience sees it too.

Special features are mostly absent as well, save a silent and random photo gallery without narration. But with a two-hour runtime for one performance, there probably wasn't much space to fit too many extras. Instead, it's worth watching the concert again and considering making the commute to My Morning Jacket's November shows in Austin and Dallas.

For more information, and to watch a one-minute preview, visit www.mymorningjacket.com.

Send comments to dcshobiz@mail.uh.edu