My Morning Jacket

No disappointment here. The whole album, top to bottom, is phenomenal.

The layout of the album is really not terribly complicated: the first three tracks blaze a different path than the band has ever embarked upon, only to be followed by nine tracks of MMJ doing what they do best (though, arguably, in slightly different ways), all capped off by an experimental yet conclusive closer. So it’s not the structure of the album that’s so tenably remarkable as how Jim James and Co. pull it off.

As I mentioned, “Evil Urges,” “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 1” and “Highly Suspicious” are hands-down the most ambitiously inventive tracks that My Morning Jacket has yet produced. Although a few tracks like “Anytime” or “It Beats For You” can be compared to “Evil Urges” and “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 1” because of a few similar stylistic elements, the analogues fall short in light of the unconventional vocalizations that James adopts and the roaring synth lines that crash together over bass driven backbeats. This new collation is then effectively stripped down to bare components in “Highly Suspicious,” as James wails his Prince-like falsetto over an unadorned beat that gets joined by a few rough power lines and some intimidating British bobbies for the chorus, accomplishing the most bizarre and polarizing track on the album: either you love it, hate it or can’t take it seriously enough to care.

Just as it becomes apparent that MMJ have taken a permanent turn to the weird, the anthemic “I’m Amazed” surges forth with the Southern glory the band is reputed for in their live performances, setting up a new phase that encompasses a more traditional My Morning Jacket sound.  There are still evidences of the band’s artistic progression, though. A couple of the tracks, “Sec Walkin’,” “Librarian” and, especially, “Thank You Too!” harness lush string arrangements, although the tracks themselves are quite different in terms of chorus composition; the broodingly lusty “Librarian” doesn’t have one, while the effervescent “Thank You Too!” swells into a bravado of orchestration. Of the remaining tracks, the most notable are “Two Halves” and “Aluminum Park,” the former being a catchy bubble pop number that recalls Roy Orbison, the latter finding MMJ pulling out the stops for a riff heavy rocker. The ride is consummated with the eight minute “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 2,” which sounds nothing like its predecessor (or anything else on the album for that matter…perhaps a peek inside their future direction?), ending the experience in a spacey flurry of excitement and intrigue.

Overall: A+
Why an A+? To answer that question, you have to ask what makes an album or a band great. My Morning Jacket is a great band because of their stellar musicianship, clarity of vision, unique style of songwriting and craftsmanship, superb stage presence and a host of other reasons that I won’t bother to go into here. Evil Urges is a great album because the band has taken a risk at alienating their fanbase by changing their stylistic convention in the opening tracks, then, by settling back into a familiar yet now somehow alien landscape, they have redefined the context of their artistic goals and assimilated their entire catalog into a larger framework. Before Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket was a good Southern rock band who made a successful “experimental” album a few years back. Now they are one of the premier groups in the country, poised to be named among the great trailblazers in early 21st century music.