My Morning Jacket's latest album, Evil Urges, is the strangest album of the year. It's stranger than Max Tundra and it's stranger than Lau Nau and it's stranger than Zach Hill.

I've been championing this band for about eight years and every album I'm confused and amused and delighted. I spent time making out to At Dawn as an undergrad. I cranked It Still Moves while tearing down Florida back roads as a traveling salesman for New College. I actually got to dance to Z. But I don't know what I'm going to do with Evil Urges. The opening track starts out with the best OK Computer music since OK Computer and then abruptly becomes a sex song completely with breathy falsetto and a naive little piano melody tossed around in the synth strings. The next track features pitch perfect 80's synths mixed with 90's clench-jaw vocals. Track three is a synth-pop-Powerman 5000-Danielson Familie song about "peanut butter puddin' suprise." And it just keeps going. There's little in the way of echoy caterwauls or even huge alt country arena rocking guitar solos (though they're here).

It's not my favorite My Morning Jacket album, but it's still better than most of what I've heard this year. It all works and there's a surprise around every track. If this music weren't so deceptively difficult and just so strange these guys would have the greatest album of 1985. The band has reinvented itself just like they do on every album. It's not for everyone, but it's so far removed from what the kids are slamming to these days that you can't help but listen.