Anyone who says he or she could have predicted My Morning Jacket would release 2005’s best album is just plain full of it. In the Louisville rockers’ prior discography, signs of promise showed in one solid album after another, but even the faintest allusions could not have hinted at the infinite brooding and cohesive assault MMJ packed into Z.
Three years later, expectations could not have be higher across the buzzing blogosphere for MMJ’s fifth album, the ominously-titled Evil Urges. After Z’s pitch-perfect delivery, the band seemed capable of anything in or out of the studio.
But instead of anything, Jim James and company have chosen to do everything on Urges. The restrained moments, the lovely interplay between crescendo and decrescendo and all other notes of subtlety have been hastily erased from MMJ’s musical vocabulary. They come out no-holds-barred on Urges, and it is rarely for the better.
Listening to the new MMJ album proves to be an alternately exciting and frustrating experience for devotees of the band’s preceding efforts. Not satisfied with any sort of tried-and-true formula, the band forges on, experimenting with synthesizers, drum machines and abrupt melody shifts.
Surely they deserve credit for refusing to rest on their laurels. But MMJ had a great thing going on Z – sort of a backwoods, American-roots rock answer to Radiohead. However, some of these departures – which are certainly jarring at first – end up playing out for the best.
Both “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream” tunes (Part 1 and Part 2) forgo organic instrumentation for synth-heavy compositions. Part 2 chugs along in an eight-minute pseudo-disco death funk, bouncing under James’s airy falsetto. The risk pays off, and the song ends the album on a favorable note before the incredibly indulgent six-second track “Good Intentions” kicks in.
On other parts of the album, be the band’s intentions good, evil or somewhere in between, MMJ has a lot to answer for.
Though admittedly fun, the band’s would-be homage to Spinal Tap, “Highly Suspicious,” kills the momentum of the album’s strong opening – as a B-side, why not; a concert rarity, sure; but most certainly not as track three on the band’s fifth album. The repeated lyric, “peanut butter pudding surprise,” may seem appetizing, but it only adds to the ridiculousness.
Since the band attempts nothing tonally akin to the off-kilter track elsewhere on the album, the song feels like a misplaced inside joke, a playful demo that somehow fell from the soundboard into the track list. As Urges progresses, it gradually resembles an odds and sods collection pasted together with the snippets left on the cutting room floor from past sessions.
Even the more successful songs fail to make as much of an impression as they should. “Aluminum Park” sees James channeling some Springsteen-flavored nostalgia with searing guitar solos tearing right down the song’s midsection – likeable, but not all that discernable from previous MMJ rockers. In similar fashion, “I’m Amazed” and “Sec Walkin'” never get disagreeable or entirely memorable.
And maybe that is why Evil Urges hurts. So much of the album is downright palatable, like an obligatory studio set from a predominantly live band. Only the dusty “Librarian,” with hokey references to the “interweb” and “looking for a lesson in the periodicals,” deserves to be permanently shelved.
It feels odd, but in some senses MMJ has taken a step back to the band it was before Z. Once again the band has become a stellar live act with just enough potential to cook up something great in the studio.
The pieces to the puzzle are all there, just not neatly arranged, as they were the last time around. On the title track, also the album opener, the band begins with what sounds like a logical follow-up to Z. But at the three-minute mark, the Southern instincts kick in and the band rails through a post-Skynyrd guitar interlude before returning to the main melody, as if the breakdown had never occurred.
Let the song “Evil Urges” be a lesson – MMJ is a group completely aware of what it is doing and where it wants its sound to go. If the band’s latest album is mildly disappointing, it is not for lack of invention on the part of the artists.
The band has deliberately constructed something loose and wild, the anti-Z. Although the album should cast doubt in the eyes of a few true believers, MMJ still retains the element of surprise.
zherrm@umd.edu
RATING: 3 STARS OUT OF 5
