My Morning Jacket has yet to release a bad album, but they may have already released their masterpiece. In 2001, Jim James and the boys from Louisville holed up in Above the Cadillac Studios in Shelbyville, Kentucky to record their second album: At Dawn.

The album is a thing of beauty. It doesn’t so much change the sound from their debut, The Tennessee Fire, as it does expand on it—the addition of keyboardist Danny Cash puts them over the top, taking their music from the merely great to the transcendent.

A friend of mine once told me his theory that Jim James based the band’s sound entirely around Neil Young’s languid epic, “Expecting to Fly.” “Hopefully” seems to have been created soley to support this theory. Had this song been on their previous record, it might have been a simple acoustic song and it still would have been brilliant. However, here it gets the widescreen treatment: the acoustic guitar and James’ treated vocals flow over a bed of sounds; crickets chirp throughout over constantly droning feedback, giving the feeling of watching the red sun go down over the blue Kentucky hills. Not to mention that “Hopefully” contains possibly the best lines in any of James’ love songs: “Hopefully it occurs to me / That there’s one thing I can’t stand / That’s the thought of one single day / Without your head in my hands.”

I hate steel drums. Hate them. The steel drum’s sole purpose is to be used as a crutch when some crappy song is trying to evoke the Caribbean (one exception: “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction). So it comes as a surprise that my favorite part of the wondrous country of “X-Mas Curtain” is the breakdown at 2:07 where the steel drums come in to steal the show (a close second is the weird effect in the intro which sounds like a UFO landing). No one knows what a line like “get some action, from the x-mas girl that lives inside your womb” means, but who cares? This song is just plain beautiful.

But by far the one song from this album that sticks with me most is “Just Because I Do,” a song that erases any lasting memories of the horrible latter-day Lynyrd Skynyrd and details why the country fell so hard for Southern Rock in the ‘70s (and easily makes a case for bringing it back). With the best snare hit opening since “Like a Rolling Stone,” the song comes out of the gate with all the right tools swinging: twangy guitars, R&B fills, harmonica crying in the background and it all amounts to the catchiest and maybe most straight-forward rock song these guys have done before or since. But it doesn’t become transcendent until the last thirty seconds or so when the tempo slows to a country shuffle.

As great as It Still Moves and Z are (and they are), they’re also the sound of a band with something to prove. But in some ways, it seems like they proved it all with At Dawn. It sounds like the record Jim James had been waiting to make his whole life, and when he finally did he wondered, what do we do now? I can tell them (and you) what to do: go back and listen to this album and be reminded of how awe-inspiring and fun rock music can be.

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