Temptation

Every time I hear about a new My Morning Jacket album it seems the anticipation is higher than the time before. It helps that the band has had a steadily upward-moving career, with "It Still Moves" and "Z" being the band's two best albums of their career. They're back once again today with the formidable "Evil Urges," and understandably the anticipation by many has never been higher. Singer Jim James came out of recording this album promising something a little different for fans, and the real question was whether or not that "different" implied good or bad. If you want to put it another way, this was a test to see if the "urges" James felt to do something different were in fact good or "evil."

Let's go right for the gusto: "Evil Urges" isn't too great, but it is very solidly good. Though I do count it as one of the weakest of My Morning Jacket's albums. As much as I wanted to like it, there was just a little too much...general strangeness going on for me to fully get into this thing. Frankly speaking, "Highly Suspicious" happens 3 tracks into the album, and that's about as odd as MMJ has ever gotten, with James doing a Prince-esque impression and singing lyrics ("peanut butter surprise"?! really?!) that are practically off-putting. I've yet to find the person that actually likes this song (if you do, leave a comment or something). Punch number four is "I'm Amazed," which I've actually been hearing on the radio quite a bit these past few weeks. While it is nice hearing My Morning Jacket get some air time, "I'm Amazed" seems perfectly marketed for radio, almost like the one easy throwaway song the band threw on just to help drum up some support for this strange adventure called an album. It's a southern rocker with a chorus that's easy to pick up on and repeat but will leave your consciousness as soon as the song has ended.

There are a couple other bland-ish songs on "Evil Urges" that certainly don't help the overall enjoyment of the album, however on the whole the good outweighs the bad. If you're up for some legitimate adventure, try out both parts of "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream." "Part 1" does a great job as a standard MMJ track, but "Part 2" takes that foundation and blows it up into an 8+ minute rave-up that probably makes for one of my favorite songs of this calendar year so far. Not counting the final track listed, "Good Intentions," which isn't really a song at all, "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, Pt. 2" represents a direction that MMJ could have ventured into and found major success with. It has that jam-band side the band has become known for, plus some fascinating electronic grooves that make the song almost danceable, and overall it's a wonderful sort of epic. This is the kind of song you wish were longer despite it's 8+ minutes actual length. It also makes you wish the entire album sounded just like that. Tragically, you have to wade through some bogus songs to get to that glorious finale. Again, by no means is this album bad- over half the tracks are completely worth your time- but in a time when we've come to expect so much from My Morning Jacket, a strong pulling away from the sounds that made them so acclaimed would only have been the right move had they a clear idea where they wanted to go next. Instead, it feels like "Evil Urges" is an exercise in testing the waters. The band consistently dips their toes into various pools but fails to actually submerge themselves in one particular niche. Hopefully next time around they'll find a better consistency.

My Morning Jacket- Evil Urges
My Morning Jacket- Aluminum Park

Stream the entire album at the band's Myspace page

Buy "Evil Urges" from Amazon

Labels: my morning jacket