Upon first hearing “Highly Suspiscious,” from My Morning Jacket’s newest LP Evil Urges, one of the — what do you call them? Singles? Whatever a band releases to the internet to preview its forthcoming record — I felt a sort of dismay. Having grown to adore My Morning Jacket for the searing, epic guitars (especially as exemplified on the band’s double-disc live opus Okonokos), the folksy charm, and Jim James’ falsetto-reverb vocals, the fact that “Highly Suspiscious” sounded like a band trying to cover Prince disturbed me greatly. Was this the band I had claimed to love? Praised endlessly? Pushed on so many people?
The answer, of course, is yes. There’s plenty of that My Morning Jacket in Evil Urges. Sadly, that for which I feel nostalgia is a bit watered down and left in the dust by the styles explored throughout this record. Evil Urges is a bit schizophrenic, is definitely strange and lacks the cohesive nature of past releases. My brother put it best when he said, “It’s really good. But I listened to it once and then listened to At Dawn.”
My Morning Jacket simply won’t sit still. This is admirable in theory, but in practice finds them genre-bending to a fault. What’s so great about records like At Dawn or It Still Moves is the purity about them: the idea that, without question, this is a band that has honed its form and sounds good doing so. Starting with Z and moving on to Evil Urges, MMJ seems to be more interested in shedding identity than in progressing it. On one hand, the band seems to stress the quieter, folk-influence side of things. There’s less reverb on James’ vocals here, for instance. There are spare songs that recall the standard country trio line-up. But, again, this almost plays as a foil to the bombastic, experimental side of things, and the problem is that it’s very difficult to be both. Loud and quiet, experimental and traditional: these are natural, obvious opposites, and MMJ explores its poles. To end this musical soul-searching, however, My Morning Jacket will need to either pick one or work toward balancing things out to sow that middle ground.
This is likely a result of an industry quandary: MMJ began to get attention for doing what they’d been doing for several albums when It Still Moves got picked up by a major label. It’s not so difficult to stop and consider a band that wants to continue to push itself, and its fans, and to not continue to release the same record. (Unless you’re an aficionado, it’s difficult to immediately pick out which record any given song came from as they all sound quite similar: it’s this sound, and not the structure or the playing, necessarily, that’s being left by the wayside). The point is this: with Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket continues on the tract of a band whose earlier releases are getting distanced from its current ones, and not just by years. We can be optimistic about this, though: in the great tradition of bands which experiment as a method of transcendence, Evil Urges is still enjoyable, and still has great moments. That inkling reigns over, though: the fear that, if only for a moment, you’re losing one of your favorite bands to obscurity. Cross your fingers, but don’t hold your breath.