When you’re as obsessive about music as I am, you’re constantly on the hunt. As frequently as I might buy a record though, I’m always listening to several new albums while I’m getting into the ones I end up buying. As much as my collection serves as a snapshot of what I was into at any given point in my life, a lot of what I was listening to is out of frame.

My Morning Jacket is one of those bands that has existed just outside of my financial commitment for a long time—especially this record. There were a number of times where I was actively debating between buying a copy of Evil Urges and something else, and Evil Urges never won out. That is, until a few months ago where a copy popped up at the right place at the right time and we reunited.

In my senior year of college, one of my most frequent sources of new music was a website called Black Cab Sessions, wherein musicians would perform in the back of a London taxi. The first lick of music I heard from My Morning Jacket (after hearing their name for years) was a stripped down version of “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream, Part 2” from this project, driven by the fabled Omnichord synthesizer. The performance immediately grabbed my attention, and I ran to Ruckus (remember Ruckus? That was a nice eight months) to listen to the record. And while I was initially disappointed at how different the studio version was, I found myself continuously drawn to the record.

Had I not been getting into bands like Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Wilco, The Flaming Lips, Local Natives, Grizzly Bear, and on and on and on at the same time, this record would have joined my collection much earlier. The group had been spinning away from their alt-country center for a while at this point, most significantly on the record Z three years before this. And while there’s plenty of that core sound in tact, it’s augmented by funk, 70s soft rock, disco, prog-rock, psychedelic, and even some electronica.

Admittedly, it’s a bit uneven—the Prince-aping “Highly Suspicious” is a hard pill to swallow. The meandering title track has a couple sections that don’t quite mesh with the rest of the soundscape they’ve built. But when you have songs like “Sec Walkin,” “Librarian,” and both of the songs called “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream,” you can forgive a little fat.

Reading up on this record for this post though, I’m surprised to find that it was regarded by many fans to have been a flop. I guess that’s as good an excuse as any to spend more time with their earlier records.