Take a look at My Morning Jacket, five white Kentucky men of serious mien and even more serious hair. So much hair.

They bear guitars, drums and keyboards in the conventional way. After a decade they had a reputation for long musical forays of a complex, psychedelic nature, like a jam band grown up on a diet of Neil Young and herbal smokes rather than the Grateful Dead and electric kool aid. For most people, especially most of their fans, they were a rock band. A good rock band, maybe even a great rock band, but still, a rock band.

But they're not. Ask Jim James, singer and songwriter and you'll be told My Morning Jacket are a soul band. Not just because he took to offering a falsetto or two on their recent album, Evil Urges. Or because one out-and-out funky song sounds more like Prince than Lynyrd Skynyrd. But because when he approached making Evil Urges, James did what he always has: aimed for recreating in some way his favourite album, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On.

"I think it's maybe the greatest album ever made in my humble opinion," says James (born James Olliges jnr) in a manner so relaxed you could almost call it reclining.

"For me it feels like the ultimate musical goal achieved. From every vantage point. It's so emotional, so spiritual and it combines so many aspects: there's some rock, there's some soul, some beautiful string arrangements, the rhythms are insane, the melodies are insane. The whole thing is perfectly timed and perfectly paced and it flows like a river.

"The meaning, the hope of the human race that is tied up in the whole thing, is so positive. It's a positive record that is so crushingly melancholic at the same time. It's just a holy record to me."

That blend of rock and soul and rhythms, melodies and spirituality and melancholy is all through Evil Urges. It's an ambitious amalgam, one tried by many over the years but few have managed to do it successfully and certainly not without taking a risk of alienating fans or confusing critics. MMJ didn't escape the opprobrium from some of their most devoted supporters.

"It's funny, a lot of people do just listen to one kind of music and I feel like a lot of the time people determine the music they are listening to by their race or their gender," James says. "I think a lot of people who put on a record by a band that they classify in their head to be a white indie rock band of males in their 20s don't like it when they hear something that they don't immediately identify with."

Is he any different when artists he likes make changes?

"Absolutely not. I feel like a lot of my favourite music, I didn't like it at first or I didn't understand it or it took me a while to understand it," confesses James. "I remember feeling that way with What's Going On the first time I heard that because I don't think I was ready for the depth, complexity and the notion of hearing something that was like Dark Side Of The Moon, in its concept and execution and flow."

Which is a cue to see another exchange point between the physical and emotional sides, the rock and soul sides — the Neil Young/Pink Floyd and Marvin Gaye sides if you like — of My Morning Jacket: their near-spiritual state on stage where shows can extend beyond four hours.

"Music in that sense is the ultimate religious experience for me," says James, almost reverentially. "Playing a concert, the best concert, is one that doesn't exist: it feels so good that the whole evening kind of turns into a big blur of sound and light and feels like it only lasted three seconds instead of three hours. That's the reason why people play music and the reason why people want to see music, because it is that connection with the other realm. We are all searching for some sense of peace where you are gone, caught up in the music or your writing or your art or love. That's religion to me, that escaping yourself."

Bernard Zuel