Evil Urges by My Morning Jacket: A brilliant new direction, or a band that's lost its way?

By now My Morning Jacket fans have stopped scratching their heads in confusion and settled somewhere between two camps: those who hate Evil Urges and those that love it. While My Morning Jacket has already showed an interest in funk and prog rock, I doubt many fans anticipated some of the directions this would lead the band in. A friend of mine who is a pretty strong fan of the band was pissed off when he first heard this album. He described it as "yacht-rock" and said it sounded like Ween. A couple weeks later, his opinion was echoed in Pitchforkmedia.com's review of the album.

But not everyone has hated this album. Rolling Stone gave it four stars. But Rolling Stone gives everything four stars. Because Pitchfork's was the only review I'd read, I went into this review assuming that it's been pretty tepidly received. But Metacritic has the album receiving a 7.0--mostly positive reviews. But I hadn't read any of those when I started to listen to this album.

And right from the beginning, MMJ seems ready to to shatter the expectations of fans. Opening track, "Evil Urges" brings up memories of Z until Jim James starts singing. For this song he sings in a high falsetto that will be instantly grating to some listeners. The song features some interesting guitarwork towards the end, but ultimately fails to live up to its promise. Probably the most jarring song is "Highly Suspicious" where the falsetto is again on display, but this time he's backed by bizarre monotone vocals. This song makes me think of Prince. And I hate Prince. The solo towards the end is muted and wasted. Some might see MMJ going in a new funk and R&B direction with this song. I hear soft rock instead.

And then it gets worse. "I'm Amazed" is a downer because it's the first song on the album that sounds like MMJ, and it just makes me want to listen to one of the earlier MMJ albums. It's a pretty rock song that doesn't come close to matching their best work. And then there's "Thank You Too!" From the start, this song doesn't sound that different from MMJ's quieter more restrained songs. But when I got to the chorus, the yacht-rock accusations made perfect sense.

But halfway through the album, the quality dramatically picks up. "Librarian" is a haunting acoustic guitar driven song that holds up quite well. And for "Aluminum Park" and "Remnants" MMJ decides to be a rock band again, delivering two brilliant rock songs, bursting with energy. And then for the final two songs, "Smokin from Shootin" and "Touch me I'm going to scream pt. 2", they finally make their prog-rock sensibilities work for them. Both songs start quietly and build to a strong finish. If their other experiments had been as successful, they would have made a truly great album.