My Morning Jacket

Ask diehard My Morning Jacket fans (and the numbers are growing by the hour) to name the group's core tracks, and listen as the same titles are mentioned again and again: the sawdust shuffle of "Golden," the thundering rock 'n' roll of "One Big Holiday," the aching tenderness of "Just One Thing" — these are the Basics that leave us breathless 'til the house lights come on.

Few bands utilize the LP's potential quite like My Morning Jacket, whose albums tend to clock in at an epic 73 minutes. And when the group's not filling those vast spaces with choice cuts ("I Will Sing You Songs," "Evelyn Is Not Real") their seemingly bottomless songwriting well spills over to in-between EPs, like the brilliant Chocolate And Ice and Acoustic Citsuoca.

For real MMJ fans (and, yes, that's what we call the group), Deep Cuts is where the fun really begins — where we roll up our sleeves and (strongly) suggest cuts we know you're gonna dig. Cuts like the group's hypnotic takes on Elton John's "Rocket Man" and Cass Elliot's "Dream a Lil Dream of Me."

"America is a lot closer to getting its own Radiohead, and it isn't Wilco," wrote Rolling Stone. "My Morning Jacket, from Louisville, Kentucky, have been on the road to their OK Computer for a while." We couldn't agree more. Thanks in large part to the songwriting genius of hirsute frontman Jim James, the five-piece uses the hauntingly beautiful Americana of Neil Young merely as a launching pad to something greater — an endlessly imaginative soundscape spanning funk to power pop.