Feel You is a fucking jam.

This song hit me today on my third listen overall.

What an album

listening to the first waterfall right now

i love like a river

movin’ away is so gorgeous...great closer

You listening to Circuital too?

Yeah Feel Ya is sexy

just a few circuital tracks after the waterfall

During my first listen I was fighting the impulse to immediately compare Waterfall II to the rest of the catalogue. My first thoughts were: "this sounds like Jim James solo, the melodies are little simple, where's the beef?" all the while trying to stay open minded. I mean, this is My Morning Jacket, a band I've loved for 20 years now. You know how the story ends, about half way through the first listen and solidly after the second listen, I am so stoked to have this record!!! I'm going to be listening to this a lot and enjoying the hell out of it! Waterfall II has everything I love about My Morning Jacket.


As for Evil Urges, can people list out the songs they think are some of MMJ's worst?

the closing track on Waterfall II is god awful though

I don’t think it is awful. Misplaced on the track listing like they had nowhere else to put it. Welcome Home would have been the perfect closer though.

we can start with highly suspicious. admittedly it's (mindless) fun in concert, so a credit to them, but on the record it's a pesky wart.

two halves and look at you bog down the middle of the record and are fairly unmemorable. and call me crazy, but evil urges itself isn't that good.

i'll concede that i've thawed on evil urges a little bit over the years, but it's still a record filled with a lot of songs i can't get into and is the last record i'd reach to from them. i remember buying it on my way to bonnaroo that year - it came out the week of the fesitval - and listening to it in the car with my friend and both of us were like 'what the fuck is this shit'. we'd been at their bonnaroo shows the previous years and got into their other albums over that time, so we were really excited about this album and their show that weekend. suffice it to say the show was the real highlight between the two. in many ways i guess i've just never really gotten over or lost that feeling of utter disappointment listening to evil urges for the first time and it clouds my experiences when listening to those songs/that album ever since.

that said, touch me part 2 was an instant favorite on that first listen and really blows away anything else on that album and is much better than most if not everything else they've put out since.

Highly Suspicious...the moment when i began to suspect i wasn't on yimmy's wavelength anymore
I'm Amazed...super generic but fine i guess
Thank You Too!...shit
Sec Walkin...passable but still pretty shitty
Two Halves...no memory of this at all
Librarian...this is their Can't Deny Me...just godawful and embarrassing
Look at You...cool praise and worship song, yimbo!
Aluminum Park...kinda catchy in a shitty way
Remnants...no memory of this at all

I can see all of that. There was definitely a huge drop off form Z to Evil Urges. I can suspend judgement and enjoy I'm Amazed through Aluminum Park (with the exception of Two Halves). I never dug Remnants.

As for Waterfall II, this feels like them tapping into what made MMJ great in the first place. I'm really enjoying this one.

For me, Evil Urges is just a major left turn where they were really pushing themselves into new territory. It Still Moves is basically for me the apex of the sound they developed in the first two albums, with Z being a more accessible extension of that sound. Both It Still Moves and Z are among my all time favorite albums. Evil Urges is a push toward a new sound, with moments of tremendous success (both parts of Touch Me..., Smokin’ From Shootin’) and moments that didn’t quite deliver (Look At You, Librarian, Sec Walking). I do like Evil Urges, at the very least the ambition of Highly Suspicious (it actually sounds great live), I’m Amazed, Aluminum Park, and Remnants. And that covers a lot of range for this band. This was a big swing album, and maybe instead of a grand slam they got a sacrifice fly where at least a few runners came in.

Agreed on The Waterfall II. It is everything that makes this band great.

I would have gone with "broken bat single where the shards left fans in the first row permanently disfigured," but that's just me.

Makes me think of our laid back national pastime in a new profound sense.

That's solid posting right there!

this all sounds correct, but i can't remember what sec walkin sounds like...librarian is pretty easily their worst song to me

These guys have always sucked. You boners have been duped.