My Morning Jacket - Evil Urges

The band’s long-awaited follow-up to 2005’s full-length ‘Z’ is finally here and it is typically an eclectic piece of work above anything else. Whilst the album ticks all the boxes of what should be in a My Morning Jacket album, it is also this steadfast desire to do too much in one album that makes ‘Evil Urges’ a good, but not great album. Over the fourteen tracks on offer you can’t help but feel it could’ve been made more coherent if they had only stepped back and checked the way that the opening three tracks simply do not work. ‘Evil Urges’ itself is a mess of Bernard Butler styled vocals with jazzy pop guitars that sets the album off on a rather bum note. The real low point however is graced by the electro pop nonsense of ‘Highly Suspicious’, a Gary Numan pub tribute band in full swing if ever there was one. Yet from this point on things take a turn for the better.

It amazingly isn’t until fourth track that the album settles down into a flow of lo-fi indie that lifts the album into a far more pleasant experience. The lush orchestra tinged guitar work on ‘Thank You Too’ sits well next to the romanticism that overspills from ‘Look At You’. The spiky throttle of rock also makes its welcome appearance towards the end of the album on Remnants, which offers listeners a chance to see the menacing underbelly that until this point was firmly tucked away. ‘Evil Urges’ could have been a fine album. The highlight rests solely on ‘The Librarian’, a dark acoustic led track that discards much of the feedback throb of any earlier work, revealing instead a fragile and intimate side to an album that ultimately comes together, but only just. In general ‘Evil Urges’has a lot to offer. The mixed bag of eclectica does work in most cases, but you can’t help but feel that had it not been so gracelessly let down by its earlier tracks, this album could have been so much better.