My Morning Jacket's Jim James / Photo by Mark C. Austin

"Baby, you set my soul on fire / I got two little arms to hold on tight / And I want to take you higher / Baby, you never should say never / I got a hurricane inside my veins / And I wanna stay forever"

Jason Pierce's new Spiritualized album Songs in A&E is for the battered but shakily defiant, the wounded but still willing, the self-destructive suckers who keep haunting both dens of iniquity and pews of sanctity vainly searching for answers to questions that they don't even know how to ask properly. In other words, all of us, and particularly those of us who were sweating like drunk stepdads watching Pierce sit on a chair and manfully strum his acoustic guitar in the Mojave tent on Sunday.

Spiritualized / Photo by Mark C. Austin

Backed by three violins, a cello, and three back-up singers -- all women, all dressed in black, all seated -- Pierce, sunglasses firmly in place, barely moved at all, facing toward keyboardist Doggen Foster (not the crowd), who was seated and dressed in black, also wearing shades. Whether Pierce was whispering or working up to a full-throated moan, the ballads from the new album (which was the majority of the set) cast a quiet pall over the crowd, which was part-transfixed, part-impatient, part-bewildered, and gradually thinned out over the course of the set. And to be honest, it's not surprising that this music, in the harsh daylight, is not going to work for everybody, and I can't tell you exactly why I was so moved, or which particular songs did the moving, partly since my notebook was a sweat-soaked blur of blue-ish scribble. Here are some words I could make out: "withering," "fucking self-assured," "don't mind dying," "dehydration deathmarch blues," "midget burnout bogarting a joint," "Amen."

Over on the main stage, My Morning Jacket were casting more of a spell than a pall, and though it's still hard to pin down what that spell is (which is probably to their credit), it's only growing deeper and more nuanced and dynamic. Bandleader Jim James' vocals, though still somewhat indecipherable, tap into a timeless wail that seems to float across fields and mountains and hollers and deserts and still be capable of nudging up to you while you're locked in your bedroom or imprisoned in traffic. The songs are intimate but expansive, and he and Carl Broemel's Gibson-guitar interplay -- Flying V vs. Les Paul -- effortlessly slides from warm to savage to silly-ass to grandiose to a flat-out roar. The stiff funk falsetto of "Highly Suspicious" left some baffled, but not for long.

My Morning Jacket / Photo by Mark C. Austin

At this stage in their career, MMJ have become the kind of artistically evolved band that I can imagine playing at any number of milestone events in your adult life and legitimately (almost) evoking the emotions involved -- from the terrifying loss of your innocence to the realization that you're glad it's finally fucking gone, from the first real shattering of your heart to the first real surrendering of your soul, from the first time you take yourself seriously to when you mercifully stop and actually laugh at all the pathetic bullshit you put your friends through, from the death of your parents to the birth of your first child, et al.

My Morning Jacket / Photo by Mark C. Austin

And there's not a pretentious bone in their bodies -- or at least they're skilled enough to keep it hidden. James just seems immersed in the immensity of music, which was apparent when he stopped the show to express his Portishead geekdom, and try to explain the impact of their Day 2 performance: "It's like a horrific funhouse and Beth [Gibbons] is like a spirit angel guiding you through it." I could insert a smart-ass, rockcrit punch line here, but sorry, I know exactly what the guy means.

Unfortunately, the oncoming, faux-Floyd fuckwittery seemed to distract the rapidly enlarging crowd, so I bailed to the aforementioned Sahara (a.k.a. "Dance") Tent, where the general idea was to bang one's body into an extended delirium to a series of mindlessly crowd-pleasing, frequency-tweaked electro-jams and blot out whatever enervating thoughts might be intruding on the closure of your weekend's pleasure. But strangely, for whatever reason (fear that too many bad little kiddies were putting too many bad little things into their systems?), the police presence had been ramped up markedly, and even the artists were having a difficult time accessing the backstage area. Credentials that had been honored all week were suddenly denied, and a series of new authorizations were supposedly needed (at one point, I had five different wristbands on my arm) and members of Chromeo (set to perform shortly) were locked outside and Justice (who were set to headline) couldn't even load in their equipment. Considering the retarded chaos of the situation, and the arrogant mook behavior of security, people didn't really freak out. They just milled around wondering why the usually best-run festival in the world had suddenly turned into an asshole-controlled, velvet-rope superclub on Washington Street in Miami Beach. For Simian Mobile Disco, Chromeo, and Justice! Not exactly the Monsters of Rock.