My Morning Jacket
Evil Urges
2008
Well produced. Good songs. Great energy. Terribly uneven.
"Evil Urges" is a strong release but fatally flawed by inconsistency. It is more than alright to represent different genres and mix dissimilar sounds on an album but you must do it in a way that gives that album a sense of purpose; a unifying aesthetic.
My Morning Jacket bookends this record with "Evil Urges" and "Touch Me I'm Going To Scream Pt. 2" which work fine, they are both shape-shifting tracks that provide the right tone for beginning and end. In-between them is a real mess and listeners are forced to wade through it.
"Highly Suspicious" is the song that many fans will say turned them off early on and I certainly understand why. It could be a fairly straight-forward funk track without the ridiculous, gruff backing vocals during the chorus. Had they cut it out along with "Two Halves", "Look At You", "Aluminum Park" and "Remnants" this would be a classic album. The country sounds reconcile well with the rock and psychedelia but the segment of weak songs between "Sec Walkin" and "Smokin From Shootin'" throws the album's momentum completely off.
Check out the far better "Z" before this one.
Best Track: "Smokin' From Shootin'"
"Evil Urges" is a strong release but fatally flawed by inconsistency. It is more than alright to represent different genres and mix dissimilar sounds on an album but you must do it in a way that gives that album a sense of purpose; a unifying aesthetic.
My Morning Jacket bookends this record with "Evil Urges" and "Touch Me I'm Going To Scream Pt. 2" which work fine, they are both shape-shifting tracks that provide the right tone for beginning and end. In-between them is a real mess and listeners are forced to wade through it.
"Highly Suspicious" is the song that many fans will say turned them off early on and I certainly understand why. It could be a fairly straight-forward funk track without the ridiculous, gruff backing vocals during the chorus. Had they cut it out along with "Two Halves", "Look At You", "Aluminum Park" and "Remnants" this would be a classic album. The country sounds reconcile well with the rock and psychedelia but the segment of weak songs between "Sec Walkin" and "Smokin From Shootin'" throws the album's momentum completely off.
Check out the far better "Z" before this one.
Best Track: "Smokin' From Shootin'"
Definitely agree about the album being uneven. At first "highly suspicious" left a bad taste in my mouth too, but I've come to enjoy the strange vocals and hot guitar at the end of the song. Z is on a whole other level, though.
ReplyDelete