Jim James, with Amo Amo, at First Avenue, Minneapolis (14 May 2019)

Fans showed up in force at last night’s appearance of Jim James at First Avenue in Minneapolis.



Los Angeles psych pop band Amo Amo (Love Femme, Omar Velasco, Justin Flint, Shane Mckillop and Alex Siegel) opened up the show.
For a new-ish band (having only formed in mid 2017), they were already opening for Karen O, Danger Mouse and My Morning Jacket. In fact, Jim James loved the band so much that he produced their self-titled debut album.



Since Amo Amo had a limited number of songs, the band basically played their entire debut self-titled album in their 40-min slot. They even threw in Spanish song (which I believe may be a cover song, but my Españo is not so caliente so I couldn’t tell you for sure).



Singer (and guitarist) Love Femme is clearly comfortable in a risqué outfit (and a quick investigation and it seems commonplace that she’s often in these near-topless outfits). It’s not just the outfits, but her dance moves and getting completely lost in their music – you can just tell she loves being on stage.



Love Femme sang or took lead vocals on most of the songs, with the exception of “Change Your Mind”, which had Omar Velasco taking lead. This is somewhat important to note, because you find out later that Velasco and Love Femme are backup vocals and part of Jim James’ band.



My favorite song on their set is the super groovy and funky and psychedelic set closer “Antidote”.



Despite not being a full My Morning Jacket band, fans still love Jim James and his solo effort since 2012 (which we wrote about). Now with three solo albums (and a few EPs) under his belt, you can kind of see the directions that James is heading in… and it may be a few years before we get another MMJ album (the last one came out in 2015). To be honest, based on the strong support from his fans, I’m not really sure he needs MMJ and should be writing music that he’s interested in exploring.



As you can see from the setlist, James played nothing but solo material, and the crowd didn’t mind it one bit. For the faithful, if you stuck around for the encore, you were treated to two MMJ songs, “Golden” and “I’m Amazed”.



Jim James’s double album Uniform Distortion and Uniform Clarity are out now. Clarity is the acoustic version of Distortion.



Remaining tour dates:

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