Evil Urges

My Morning JacketEvil UrgesI stopped reading reviews for the albums I planned to write about a few years ago in fear that other writer’s opinions were soiling my own. Not planning to write about the latest My Morning Jacket album, Evil Urges, I went ahead and read a handful of reviews before buying the already contentious album. Most notable of my reading was writer Will Hermes’ review for Rolling Stone, which compared Evil to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Radiohead’s Kid A, two albums that saw their makers spreading their creative wings, taking chances with new production and songwriting approaches.

Yeah, I guess you could say Evil is like that. It takes chances with MMJ’s bombastic roots-rock sound, surely, and sees the band spreading their ambition well past the wingspan of Z, their previous - and very well executed - style bender. The difference is, however, that Evil isn’t the work of a top shelf band. Looking back, it now seems that both Wilco and Radiohead (two of the best of their time, mind you) took their respective sonic jumps because, bored with what they’d been doing, they wanted to create something as imaginative as possible. Not the case with Evil, which plays though like a confused pseudo-prog pop album on a soul (and cheesy keyboard effect) bender. That’s not to say that Evil is as bad as some of the reviews I’ve read imply. It’s a pimply face, absolutely, but it has pretty eyes, white teeth and, most importantly, clean ears.  7/10

Written by G. William Locke