WTF, My Morning Jacket?

I'm having some problems with this one tune by My Morning Jacket (watch it here).

I've come to know the band as a ersatz Buffalo Springfield meets Pearl Jam, a hybrid rustic/roots band with a little metal on the brain. So the latest release includes "Highly Suspicious," which uses Prince falsetto and backing vocals that sound like they came straight out of Styx's "Mr. Roboto." I'll be blunt: This stuff takes some getting used to.

In a recent issue of Paste, MMJ lead singer Jim James got his nose of joint about the idea of people always trying to compare new music to old. Why try to label his work rather than just listening to it, he seems to ask (I'm paraphrasing. I can't bear to go back and read a looooong story in a music magazine). But when you trot out stuff like "Highly Suspicious," complete with a lyrical nod/sexually-tinged reference to "peanut butter pudding surprise," you're gonna get people saying, "Hey that sounds like....."

I'd like to agree with Jim James. In a sense, he's right. Lazy listeners try to describe what they hear in the context of what they've already heard. But when a band wears its influences on its sleeves, or just steals outright, it's gonna draw comparisons to work that came before.