6. Evil Urges (2008)

In their own ways, each My Morning Jacket album has been stylistically diverse. But with Evil Urges that flexibility gave way to aimless genre-hopping that served to undermine the overall coherence and integrity of it as an album. It isn’t necessarily a bad album; there is still great material here. The perhaps more contentious parts are actually highlights; the electro-funk experiments are the most interesting, and I’m firmly Team “Highly Suspicious.” Likewise, “Touch Me, I’m Going To Scream” Pts. 1 & 2 are both excellent entries into the MMJ canon, “Pt. 2″ being a characteristically climactic finale propelled forth on an unrelenting disco beat, auto-harp, and James’s powerful wails, which are otherwise criminally underused on this album.

It’s the middle stretch of the album where things go awry, where the zany grooves of its opening salvo give way to a horrific detour into soft-rock shmaltz. Songs like “Sec Walkin'” and “Two Halves” feel saccharine and limp on their own, and aimless within the context of the whole album. Likewise, the late album one-two of the admittedly catchy “Aluminum Park” and the more minor “Remnants” feels like an obligatory “rock track” stop-gap to fill the place the total classic “Anytime” occupied on Evil Urges’ predecessor Z. Perhaps ironically, perhaps not, the grab-bag Evil Urges may have more pop-indie cache than their earlier albums, marking MMJ’s highest chart entry on the Billboard 200 at No. 9 (later bested by Circuital at No. 5) and garnering a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. Nevertheless, the band has worn a lot of hats, but some here don’t sit quite right on Jim James’s rock god hair, and Evil Urges may live on as a transitional record.