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.

Considerations: My Morning Jacket

MMJ is a band I've always felt I should get into, but never took the time to so - until I purchased "Okonokos," the band's sprawling two-disc live album, in October, 2006, and I suspect I've listened to it twice since that time, much to my detriment.

If Buffalo Springfield and Pearl Jam married, setted down and had kids, I suspect MMJ would be the result. They offer a sort of jam-bandish brand of rockabilly and lump in some country and rock into the mix. Finally, I've found some time to listen to at least disc one of Okonokos for a while and have to say I'm impressed with the acoustic-tinged "Golden," not to mention "Off The Record," but that's a song I've loved for a long time but have heard elsewhere.

I'm still studying these guys. For what it's worth ,their appearance in Cameron Crowe's muddled film "Elizabethtown," is one of the few things to recommend about the film.