Along with the summer solstice, the month of June 2008 represents a kind of solstice for My Morning Jacket, whose fifth studio album, Evil Urges (June 10, ATO) reveals a band that has come into its own as one of the most commanding and adventurous units on the planet.

"People looked at Radiohead when they started, and were like, 'Oh, Brit-pop rock band,'" songwriter/frontman Jim James said recently in a Rolling Stone feature story. "Now they're just fucking awesome, awesome weirdos. You can't put a label on them, and that's what I hope has been happening with us. Whether you love us or hate us, we're not any one type of band."

Joe Chiccarelli, who co-produced Evil Urges with James, describes the material on the new LP as “much more uptempo, groove-oriented and positive,” and the veteran did a brilliant job of underscoring those aspects, just as he did with the Shins’ Wincing the Night Away, the White Stripes’ Icky Thump and the Raconteurs’ Consolers of the Lonely.

In his four-star lead review for Rolling Stone, Will Hermes writes that “Evil Urges explodes the band's sound with the same kind of creative leap that Wilco took on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Radiohead took on Kid A… The elaborate, shimmering vocal overdubs on "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, Part 1" recall 10cc's prog-pop landmark "I'm Not in Love." And the record's 13-minute tag-team finale, "Smokin From Shootin" and "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, Part 2," morphs between Radiohead's computer-assisted soul, avant-roots rock and a chugging Pink Floyd space anthem… Yet you sense that for all his freaky ambition, James is still an old-fashioned guy trying to reconcile his love of tradition with the modern world. One of the record's standouts is "Librarian," an acoustic love ballad that's so archaic it's clearly a hallucination: The singer wanders through book stacks (‘Since we got the Interweb, these hardly get used’) and sees his crush listening to the Carpenters on AM radio. But songs, like books, invent their own reality, and by the time he reaches the hoary nerd-girl come-on, "Take off those glasses and let down your hair for me," it's enough to make you forswear your Amazon account... There are lots of old-school moments like this on Evil Urges… James seems well aware that any definition of 'classic rock' that doesn't include Prince, Radiohead and Wilco is pretty bereft. Now, with Evil Urges, he can add My Morning Jacket to that list.”

"I've gotten tired of normal rock & roll sounds," James confirmed in the Rolling Stone feature. "My ultimate goal is to hopefully turn people on to different types of music."

After spotlighting MMJ in his movie Elizabethtown, rock critic turned filmmaker Cameron Crowe raved, “They’re transcendent live. Albums are a whole different experience, high and lonesome and ghostly. Live, they're like Cream crossed with Creedence crossed with, I don't know, Wishbone Ash! You have to see MMJ live. Jim James is the absolute real deal. It’s the rare issue of mystique, which Neil Young somehow still has, and very few others. Maybe that was what [Rolling Stone reviewer David] Fricke was getting at with his MMJ/Radiohead theory [comparing the two bands].”

With Evil Urges, MMJ has made an album that stands as tall as the band’s towering live performances—and that’s saying something. In a Spin cover story, ATO co-founder Michael McDonald says he believes the band has made its masterpiece, adding "I think the world is finally ready for them.”