By now, we’re hoping you’ve heard the debut album from the supergroup Monsters of Folk, because the LP, which earned a four-star review in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone, has been in nonstop rotation in our office. The band — which features My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis and M. Ward — spent the last two years working on the album after first jamming during a joint tour back in 2004.
“Monsters of Folk are already being called this generation’s Traveling Wilburys, but a better comparison is Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Like CSNY, Monsters of Folk yoke together a quartet of folk-minded rockers at the top of their game — and both groups create something that’s often greater than the sum of its parts,” Will Hermes writes in his review of Monsters of Folk. “But the most striking thing, especially given the punch-line band name, is the quality and cohesiveness of the material. James, Oberst and Ward get to sing lead on five tracks each, and though any individual authorship is cloaked under collective writing credits, their signature styles stand out like scents in a Southern Italian kitchen.”
Among the standout tracks on MOF is the album-opening “Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.), the Oberst-penned “Temazcal” and Ward’s ” The Sandman, the Brakeman and Me,” which could be one of the singer-songwriter’s best tunes to date. But the MVP in this group of MVPs is James, who contributes the MMJ-esque rocker “Losin Yo Head” and the spiritual “His Master’s Call.” “This record has a lot of our individual comfort zones on it but it also has a newness,” James told Rolling Stone in our Fall Music Preview.
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...Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily