I’ve really been getting into My Morning Jacket recently, and this pseudo-EP (it’s forty minutes long!) is an interesting little aside for the band as a whole, but I’m most interested in the twenty-four minute epic ‘Cobra.’ It’s rare for a meandering jam-track to capture my attention; many of the Allman Brothers’ tracks off of their landmark Fillmore East concerts drop me off a few minutes in only to pick me up a few miles down the road again. Pink Floyd’s Echoes, a song of very similar length to ‘Cobra’, tends to fade into the walls at points with its odd submarine effects and squalling Siren sounds. With ‘Cobra’ MMY seem to fuse four or five different song fragments into one long track, and thus lose the jam-band effect of senseless noodling and prolonging a track for its own miserable good. Even the most repetitive ambient phases of the song are interesting, as stop-gap measures and resting points, moving with a sense of fluidity that approximates the best in classical music. This is a band I resisted for so long, if only because they retuned a genre of music I thought was best left untouched (classic Americana) unless something novel was brought to the game. From what I’d read, I wasn’t sure MMJ qualified. The Neil Young/Allman Brothers/blah blah blah references hold weight, but this is Americana for a generation which realizes the value of return-to-form songwriting and musicality. Clearly, I was missing the boat on this one. Ain’t I just like a kid who’s just discovered the glories of coffee when all his friends are now into Jell-o shots?