Evil Urges by Kentucky band My Morning Jacket kicks into gear right away with the titular track, with a barrage of guitars, beats and vocalist Jim James falsettoing all over the joint. It’s a sprawling opener, and manages to showcase within a few moments where exactly My Morning Jacket are at this time around. That has always been an important question to answer when it comes to the ’Jacket – in 1998, they began with the country-tinged The Tennessee Fire, and steadily grew more and more experimental and psychedelic – eventually culminating in their masterpiece, 2005’s Z.

 

But, like the opening track hints, this time around Evil Urges sees My Morning Jacket plugging away at by-the-book alternative rocking. Much of the luscious freaking-out found on Z has been scaled back, and what you’re left with is a solid though not entirely exceptional collection of songs. After ‘Evil Urges’ fades out into violin tremolo, one of the album’s highlights, ‘Touch Me I’m Going to Scream’, follows – sounding an awful lot like something The Flaming Lips recorded and then decided not to release. ‘Walkin’’ and ‘Look At You’ belie the group’s country beginnings, and add a nice bit of good ol’ blue grass to proceedings, which never did anyone any harm.

 

 

While everything on the album is quite nice, it never rises beyond this kind of vague, ‘I-like-you-but…’ banality into something truly memorable. ‘Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt.2’ is as close as Evil Urges gets – an extended, incessant funk odyssey that culminates in a sweeping climax of choirs and gnarly guitar. But the album lacks more of these genre-transcending moments, and when it does get it wrong it is downright embarrassing. ‘Highly Suspicious’ comes across as a couple of kids messing around on SingStar for a laugh, and the line “Since we got the Interweb, these hardly get used…” in the otherwise pleasant ‘Librarian’ is just so cringe-inducing you miss the rest of the song because you’re intermittently breathing in sharply through your teeth and ruefully muttering ‘ooof’.

 

The closing track on Evil Urges – the 5 second ‘Urges’ – is quite effective in summing up the plain shoulder-shrugging indifference that the album leaves you with: a lot of screechy noise that’s abruptly cut off by a man unconvincingly saying “Okay, cool”. Well, okay. Cool.