Album Review - My Morning Jacket

My Morning Jacket

“Evil Urges”

2008 ATO Records

Album Grade: A

Career GPA (based on buyer ratings from Amazon.com): 3.6

By: Brent Owen

These Louisville natives have done it again. They offer up another record that pushes the musical boundaries to almost a breaking point. While Jim James and company have become critical darlings and the industry insiders’ best kept secret – Evil Urges might very well spark the end of the band’s anonymity.

As with every album they do it’s once again...another total departure from their previous work. Their breakthrough It Still Moves sounded like a mash-up of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy and Neil Young’s Ragged Glory. The follow-up, Z, was a much more commercial sounding release that still stayed left of the middle – as if in some intangible way it was recalling an album like Television’s Marquee Moon.

This brings us to Evil Urges, an album that has no simile.

While it opens up with two of my least favorite songs that My Morning Jacket has ever recorded – the rest of the album is so strong that it warrants no more than a single point off its total score (I had to remove the +). The title track and “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream pt. 1” are weird fusions of psychedelic acid rock andR&B. While there does seem to be a point where such a combination could work, the band just doesn’t close the deal here. I will admit though, that there is an instrumental breakdown in the middle of ”Evil Urges” that comes close to making the rest of the disjointed track seem worthwhile.

“Thank You Too!” is the band at its melodic best – with a gentle and harmonious guitar riff that while brilliant is almost overshadowed by James, who seems to channel Bono’s vocals from the All That You Can’t Leave Behind album. “Sec Walkin’” is a song where we get to hear the band’s country roots on full display for the first time since “Golden” off of It Still Moves. The nostalgic narrative that the band spins during “Librarian” is irresistible, as they recall schoolboy crushes and romanticized fantasies. And don’t miss the eight minute epic “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream pt. 2” which is so good it ultimately ends up proving that “Part 1” was wholly unnecessary.

I'm not sure if it's possible to hear the scream that punctuates the end of this record and not be left wondering, “Where do these guys go from here?” They have set a high standard for themselves with Evil Urges; but then again they’ve done that with each of their previous efforts - and yet somehow with each record they have managed to not necessarily clear the previous bar, but rather they just put up a new one and clear that bar instead.

Previous Albums:
Okonokos (2006)
Z (2005)
It Still Moves (2003)
At Dawn (2001)
The TennesseeFire (1999)