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Features Not So Straight Sunday, July 13, 2008 My Morning Jacket get some funk and soul on their new album Evil Urges. By Martin Jones
I’m not one of the stalwart My Morning Jacket fans renouncing 'Highly Suspicious' as trivial. The new single is hilarious and one of the best things the band has done. Especially at this stage of their impeccably credible and acclaimed career – shaking (and lightening) things up is to be wholeheartedly commended.
That said, I’m not sold on Evil Urges as an album. Yet.
Admittedly the Kentucky crew has set an impossibly high standard to live up to over a quartet of reverb-saturated studio records and a double disc, Okonokos, that will go down as one of the decade’s great live recordings. Where to after such lofty rock pinnacles? Here, obviously: Evil Urges, a 14-song set that sees a bit of New York sass and R&B strut creeping into the wide-eyed soundscapes of these Southern Men.
The album was recorded in Manhattan, only the second album to be recorded outside of the band’s home studio-comfort, with producer Joe Chiccarelli, whose credits include recordings for Beck, U2, Elton John, and Oingo Boingo!
Of the choice of studio/producer, singer-songwriter Jim James has stated, “We wanted to deliberately try to make ourselves uncomfortable and shake it up.”
How important was such a move in the grand scheme? Personally, I doubt that it would matter much where the hell James and the team chose to document their current bunch o’ tunes… James had all these songs demoed to the nth degree before the band even started rehearsing them. He knew he wanted a change and recorded what he wanted. Even the electrofuzzstonk of ‘Highly Suspicious’?
Yep, bassist and only remaining founding member Two Tone Tommy reckons the song was pretty much as you hear it when James presented his demo tape to the band.
“I won’t say it sounds identical,” says Tommy, stuck at home with promo duties whilst James plays a few solo shows in the UK, “because obviously it didn’t have all the instruments, all the keyboards and everything, but it was pretty much already there. Now, how Jim came up with that I’m not sure. But I thought it was the most ridiculous, fun thing that he’d ever written. So I thought ‘that song has to be on the record, I don’t see how it could not be’.”
And though controversially divergent ‘Highly Suspicious’ may be (it’s already introducing the band to a whole new (soon to be mightily confused) audience, it’s not the only admirably adventurous thing on Evil Urges.
The album steps straight up with a fresh gust in the title track, all funky falsetto fun, and doesn’t let up with ‘Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Pt 1’ and ‘Highly Suspicious’. After these first three tracks, most MMJ fans’ heads will be spinning like Regan MacNeil.
There’s more pre-Evil Urges-like MMJ to follow, but the statement is made by now. And then along comes the acid-Nashville-soul of ‘Sec Walkin’’ and ‘70s FM sugarsounds of ‘Thank You Too!’ and by now you’re either desperately confused or punching the air in rapturous celebration that a group of such contemporary origins could be so unashamedly cheesyslashbrilliant (actually the more I write, the more I’m digging Evil Urges… my original gripe was based on how the sacred mystery that the group has incarnated thus far has been suddenly stripped down, dacked in public, by all this crazy fun.
But now I’m coming around to the idea that praps this is the best course of action My Morning Jacket could have taken at this point, preventing them from being trapped in a Dylanesque jail of listener-expected sanctimony. But enough reviewing… now some Two Tone Tommy testimony (already).)
Jim James has said of this record, “We wanted to deliberately try to make ourselves uncomfortable and shake it up.” Why did you want to do that?
I think we’re definitely creatures of habit. Not so much that we’re afraid of change, just that we get pretty comfortable pretty quickly with the way things are. We’re a pretty insular little group. And also recording at the farm for the first three records, so we’re really just intentionally trying to change it up every time we go in to make a record. And certainly this is the first time that we’ve ever done that in a big city was a big change for us.
Did the change of environment (the sounds and sights of New York City) help encourage an adventurous attitude of when you went into the studio?
I think, I think so. Yeah because when you weren’t in the studio, you weren’t really thinking about the music. And when you’re in the studio, it was the first time where we had a 12-hour block where you had to work and you had to get stuff done. There was only a day or two… so it was a little bit less relaxed of an environment than it’s been before. But I liked that, I liked that it was a little bit more strict.
You put the most adventurous songs up front on Evil Urges – the title-track, ‘Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Pt 1’, ‘Highly Suspicious’ – as if making an immediate announcement.
Right, right, well it was funny there was another song that was originally… we started rehearsing in Colorado last July and there was one song, a song called ‘Wonderful’ that we thought was just going to be the first song on the record, like that would be the bookend and this other song would be the other bookend. It was a couple of riffs we came up with on the fly in Colorado. And that song didn’t even turn out on the record, because the take of it didn’t work out. So it’s funny how that stuff works out.
“When I heard ‘Highly Suspicious,’” said keyboardist Bo Koster, “I knew then, OK, anything goes, there’s no stopping this.” Did you share that sentiment?
Yeah, yeah. I mean I think we’ve kind of always felt that way. But I think as we’re growing as a five-person unit, more doors open with each record. But we always have our minds open and don’t really think too much about the process.
What about those falsetto backing vocals of Sec Walkin - they’re something new and really playful for the group, who came up with them?
Yeah that was on the original demo, with Jim doing all the backups. I think that’s the song that has Carl doing the really high backups, in what we call his ‘choir boy voice’. Which sounds amazing. I think it was sent from the tape or from ProTools into Bo’s giant Leslie cabinet and you can kind of hear it warble a little bit. I love the texture of that.
You know, besides Jim’s voice and writing, I’d say those funk flavoured bass lines have become one of the most defining characteristics of the band, are you aware of really having mapped out your own style?
Oh not really, yeah, this sounds kind of goofy… I mean you hope for the best and you do the best you can and just try to be a better player. Definitely I have four other guys who are musically talented and that really pushes me, like I don’t feel like we always rely on the same kind of tricks and riffs. But I appreciate that, that means a lot.
There is a strong element of funk and R&B in the band, especially in the bass, which tends to get overlooked.
Yeah it was funny I was thinking back to all the covers we’ve done over our career and almost all of them, like ‘All Night Long’ by Lionel Ritchie or KC & The Sunshine Band, it’s almost always been R&B covers. I think that’s always been kind of lying under the surface and it kind of bubbles up.
Evil Urges is available on Spunk through EMI.
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