My Morning Jacket is one of the few major label rock bands that still makes albums. Sure, all groups periodically release collections of 10 songs and call them albums, but these are just buffets for iTunes users to nibble on. MMJ records proper long players in the vein of Exile On Main St. or Tonight’s the Night.
However, the group stumbled with their fifth album, Evil Urges, an uneasy attempt to balance the sparse experimentalism of 2005’s Z with the anthemic balladry of their earlier work. “Circuital,” from the forthcoming record of the same name, suggests they’ve found the elusive middle ground. Opening with a skeletal guitar loop, the song bursts into a propulsive electro–acoustic romp that eventually fades out over Jim James’s ghostly keens.
“I am older, day to day/Still going back to my childhood way,” James sings. But My Morning Jacket never needed to grow up; they just needed to come home.
