My Morning Jacket

Evil Urges

ATO Records

By Steven Mirkin

Before you read any further, let's get one thing straight: My Morning Jacket is not a jam band. Yes, they're usually mentioned in conjunction with Bonnaroo and it's patchouli-scented jam-happy neo-hippies, and many of their songs trade in the kind of cosmic rootsiness pioneered by the Grateful Dead, which made it easy to pigeonhole them with the jammers. Easy, but wrong.

Okonokos, their 2006 live album, was the tip off; most of that album's songs ran only a minute or so longer than their studio versions. Sure, James and lead guitarists Carl Broemel stretched out for an extra couple of bars, but they pretty much followed a set script. There was never that sense of a band breaking loose of their moorings.

But there was certainly something spacey about My Morning Jacket. It's hard to think of another band whose albums sound so stoned. Deliberately paced, drenched in reverb and featuring Jim James' otherworldly moan-Neil Young meets Roy Orbison in the opium den-on their previous studio albums, My Morning Jacket came off as moody, ethereal and haunted, a pipe dream conjured up at a séance.

Evil Urges is something different. Fleshed out and carnal, it's easily the band's earthiest album and the one that comes closest to the immediacy and power of their live shows.

A collection of come-ons, tender romances and tales of community, Evil Urges draws you in with an old-fashioned embrace. "I need a human right by my side," James exclaims at the end of "Touch Me I'm Going To Scream, Pt 1," while the thrashy, surreal "Remnants" offers up an image of heaven where "all souls, all faiths-always-we are one." He's not above commenting or tweaking his fan's expectation. "I know it sounds confusing," he admits early on, later asking "have you had enough excitement now?" And the last words he sings are "oh! This feeling is wonderful. Don't you ever turn it off." There's still plenty of reverb (a My Morning Jacket album without reverb is as impossible to imagine as a hip-hop album that doesn't use Autotune), but it's laid on with a more judicious hand. And by keeping close to the ground, they manage to cover more territory than ever before.

James makes his intention known from the very start. Less than two minutes into the album, he announces: "if you want it-it's yours!" Those evil urges? They're "part of the human way." It's a come-on to be sure, but also a statement of purpose: James is declaring himself free to write and play in whatever style he desires.

So Prince rubs shoulders with a mocking robotic chorus on "Highly Suspicious," a helium-giddy slice of nonsense with James squealing about a "peanut butter pudding surprise;" twitchy, Radiohead-like asymmetrical drum tracks and mobile bass lines are calmed by some gnomic, Robert Hunter-like advice ("row a boat across the ocean, dig a hole under a fence") in "Touch Me I'm Going To Scream Pt 1;" 70s AM-radio blue-eyed soul makes an appearance in the effusive "Thank You Too!" (the evocative strings are courtesy of David Campbell), and "Librarian" plays out its shy romance to a lilting Merseybeat ballad. With it's raspy, declarative vocal and loping guitars, "I'm Amazed" does Dylan and the Dead better, well, than Dylan and the Dead.

The densely plotted songs are filled with unexpected turns: the laconic funk of the title track segues into a classic Southern rock guitar battle; "Aluminum Park" roars from power pop to heartland anthem, "Smokin' From Shootin" starts out as the album's most traditional My Morning Jacket song, lightly syncopated country that takes its time moseying along, but it ends with blissed out guitar noise that leads into the second part of "Touch Me I'm Going To Scream," an insistent, ecstatic ‘80s dance track. And in the tradition of classic albums, Evil Urges takes its listeners on a ride, from the jittery energy of the title track to the final moments of "Touch Me," which, after the high-wire acts that precede it, brings the band in for a soft landing. (It's followed by "Good Intentions," a three-second comma of crowd noise and the words "OK, cool," that, in earlier times, would have made a fine run-out groove.)

Traditionalists have worried if in our song driven, downloadable age, it was possible for a band to craft a career that could rival the best of the ‘60s and ‘70s. They can stop worrying. Evil Urges is a restless piece of work created by a band looking to grab the brass ring. You'd be hard-pressed to find anything released this year that matches it for ambition and reach. In the end, it just might be the best album of 2008.