Evil Urges
MY MORNING JACKET
Ato Records/Red
Pundits have been trying to define My Morning Jacket since the band first arrived on the scene a decade ago. In the beginning, people filed the reverb-loving rockers under “alt-country” and even “southern rock” thanks to the band’s Bluegrass State homebase. A galvanizing 2004 performance at Bonnaroo and subsequent, more experimental releases, especially 2006’s live album Okonokos, landed My Morning Jacket in the “jam band” bin.
But none of the labels truly did the quintet’s music justice and MMJ’s latest release, Evil Urges, is the quintet’s most gloriously eclectic studio album to date. It’s also the band's finest, with each stylistic leap serving the song rather than sounding like hubris-driven experimentalism. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than on the title-track that opens the disc, a thick-yet-fluid hybrid of futuristic funk, precision prog and dream pop that serves as a genius update on the free love and tolerance ethos of the 1960s. Frontman Jim James adopts a sexy falsetto to winningly deliver memorable lines like, “It ain’t evil, baby, if ya ain’t hurting anybody.”
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2008.