Review: Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American

Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American

Some songs just linger in the cultural bloodstream. It’s impossible to predict, in the moment, which songs those will be. Occasionally, it’s the big hits, but it’s also often those same world-conquering smashes that end up sounding the most dated in retrospect. Usually, you have to wait years or even decades to see which songs have truly become songbook classics, once all the context and narrative and hype and promotion has drifted into distant memory. You have to get to the point where all that remains is the song itself and the mysterious, beguiling hold it somehow continues to have over people.

There’s a spectacular cover band in my hometown that mostly plays songs from the classic rock era. It’s not hard to see why: Those songs have been proven staples for so long that building a setlist around them is just a smart business decision. You can’t miss with “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Don’t Stop Believin’” or “American Girl.” You can’t miss with The Beatles or The Stones. There are precisely two post-2000 songs that I remember regularly hearing in the setlist from this particular cover band. The first one was “Mr. Brightside.”

The second was “The Middle.”

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Review: Jimmy Eat World – Invented

Jimmy Eat World - Invented

I have fallen in love with a disproportionately large number of my favorite albums in cars. Riding in cars, sleeping in cars, driving in cars, singing in cars. 15-minute drives to school in cars and cross-country road trips in cars. Nighttime drives with no other cars on the road and gridlocked rush hour drives with hundreds of other cars on the road. Hot-as-hell summer drives in cars and cold-as-ice winter drives in cars that were slipping and sliding down snow-covered roads. Celebratory “turn the music up” moments in cars with friends, and long, lonely, sad solo drives in cars with nothing but the music and my own thoughts to keep me company. There is something about being in transit in an automobile that makes music sound better, and it’s something that can’t be replicated on a boat, or a plane, or a train, or a subway, or a city bus. It’s the combination of the small space and the big sound, of the endless scenery flying by outside the window and the tiny self-contained environment of the vehicle. The right car ride can make a good album sound great and a great album sound immaculate. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that my fondest years of musical discovery align directly with the years where I spent the most time in cars.

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Review: Jimmy Eat World – Surviving

At least on the surface level, the title for Jimmy Eat World ‘s 10th full-length album feels like a proclamation. Surviving. Not many bands know quite as much about surviving as Jimmy Eat World. They’ve weathered a lot over the years: getting dropped by their first major label; being (incorrectly) considered a one-hit wonder by many; being a part of a genre and a music scene that most critics have always written off; touring with Third Eye Blind, apparently. Perhaps the most impressive thing they’ve survived is time. When I first started seriously listening to Jimmy Eat World, they’d been a band for ten years and were about to release the follow-up to their breakthrough LP. Fast-forward a decade and a half, and the band is celebrating 25 years and ten albums. They’ve kept the same four-person lineup since 1995 and have released a new album, like clockwork, every three years since 2001. And they remain as beloved today as they ever have been—a go-to “favorite band” for seemingly every person who follows them.

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Review: Jimmy Eat World – Chase This Light

I’m not sure I have ever anticipated a new album with quite the furor that I anticipated Jimmy Eat World’s Chase This Light in the fall of 2007. Futures had been a game-changer for me, the album that transformed me from a budding music listener into a voracious, lifelong die-hard. As often happens when you’re young, the three years that stretched between the October 19, 2004 release of Futures and the October 16, 2007 release of Chase This Light seemed to last an eternity. (I was 13 when the former came out and 16 for the arrival of the latter.) The wait was eased a bit by the 2005 release of the Stay on My Side Tonight EP, but the dark, moody nature of those songs only made me want a full-length. An album packed of songs like “Disintegration” and “Closer”? Count me in.

Chase This Light was decidedly not that record. Futures gave the band two basic paths forward. The first was to embrace the moody, late night autumnal vibe that manifested on songs like “Polaris” and “23.” That path evidently led to Stay on My Side Tonight, which was made up of songs the band had written for Futures but hadn’t finished or put on the record. The second possible path was for Jimmy Eat World to keep following their arc as a glossy studio band. They’d made Futures with Gil Norton, a well-respected rock producer known for making big, robust rock albums. Futures sounded appropriately huge, and there was some feeling—particularly in radio singles like “Pain” and “Work”—that Jimmy Eat World could be a massive radio rock band for the new millennium if they wanted to be. They could prove that “The Middle” wasn’t just a fluke hit.

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Jimmy Eat World – Live in Indianapolis (12/01/2016)

Jimmy Eat World

I’ve been listening to Jimmy Eat World for over half my lifetime. Crazy enough, the last (and only) time I attended a Jimmy Eat World show was in 2005 when they were opening for Green Day on the American Idiot tour. That’s pretty sad! Fortunately, I made some sort of amends this past Thursday when the Arizona quartet made their way through Indianapolis. Headlining one of those radio station holiday shows, the band played a 20+ song set that included a well balanced mixture of hits, deep cuts, fan favorites, and new songs.

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Review: Jimmy Eat World – Integrity Blues

Jimmy Eat World - Integrity Blues

“The open road is still miles away. Ain’t nothing serious. We still have our fun. Oh, we had it once.” These words, from the second verse of Jimmy Eat World’s perpetually underrated song, “The World You Love,” sum up so much of why I have fallen head-over-heels in love with this band over the past five years of my life. Jimmy Eat World’s music is best represented by the open road late night drives that “The World You Love” calls to mind. The freedom to explore the best of what the world has to offer.

My life is currently in a state of transition. One change, in particular, looms larger than the others. One of my closest friends, and one of the catalysts for thrusting me headfirst into Jimmy Eat World super fandom, is moving 600 miles away at the end of the month. Someday, maybe soon, I will end up relocating as well. So that line, so symbolic of the open road optimism for the future, is also simultaneously so wistful about the places we’re leaving behind, and the fun we’re putting in the rear-view mirror.

It’s this tightrope act between pensive, longing reflection on the past and relentless optimism for the future that I pondered as I drove north on I-287 through the rain, with no clear destination in mind, and the dashboard clock winding towards midnight. And sound-tracking that late-night drive was Integrity Blues, the breathtaking ninth studio album from Jimmy Eat World.

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Review: Jimmy Eat World – Integrity Blues

Jimmy Eat World - Integrity Blues

This first impression was originally posted as a live blog for supporters in our forums on September 6th, 2016. First impressions are meant to be quick, fun, initial impressions on an album or release as I listen to it for the first time. It’s a running commentary written while listening to an album — not a review. More like a diary of thoughts. This post has been lightly edited for structure and flow.

It’s here.

It’s time.

I’m going to do a first listen thread for the upcoming Jimmy Eat World album, Integrity Blues. A couple of thoughts going in: I usually try and listen to an album three times or so before doing a first listen thread, so I kind of have an idea of what I wanna talk about on each song. But because it’s JEW, and because a lot of people have been waiting for this one, and because they’re my favorite band, I’m going to do this having only listened to the album once all the way through.

I’m clearly very bias with this band, they’re basically my favorite band ever, so you should know that as well going in … like, there’s no objective way I can listen to these guys, so I’m not going to even try.

My first over-arching impressions is that this album is very Futures-esque in a lot of ways. Layers, dark, big huge pop-rock. But it includes some Invented and CTL themes as well. I think that by and large this is what I love best from the band, and I think recording with JMJ was a fantastic choice. That big huge sound just works so well with this band and on these songs they really sound big, polished, and it’s almost a complete 180 from Damage in how it sounds.

As always, I reserve the right to change my mind at another time, and this isn’t really a “review” as much as it is me going through and listening to an album and just writing down my thoughts on it while it plays.

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Review: Jimmy Eat World – Futures

Jimmy Eat World - Futures

“Has it really been 10 years?”

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot this fall, because the autumn of 2004 was one of the most important seasons of my life. It was my most paramount musically formative stage. I’d always loved music, even leading up to that season: listening to the radio, making cassette tape copies of my brother’s CDs, playing the piano, jamming the few albums I owned repeatedly in the afternoons after school, downloading tracks off Limewire and making mix CDs. But I never fully understood the impact a song or album could have on my life until the fall of 2004. Until Futures.

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Review: Jimmy Eat World – Damage

Jimmy Eat World - Damage

It’s always been astounding to me the way that songs, albums, lyrics, melodies, instrumental lines—even album titles or cover art—can become more than the sum of their parts when they collide with the right listener at the right time. In a world full of critical acclaim, “best of the year” lists, and verbose Pitchfork reviews, it seems that we have stumbled into an age of relative consensus. How many publications ranked Frank Ocean’s Channel ORANGE or Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D.City at number one last December? Or went with Bon Iver the year before? Or Kanye West in 2010? Few collective outlets, at least within the inner circle of the big critical players, venture too far beyond the same five or six favorite records at the end of any given year. Sure, those same publications review hundreds and hundreds of albums and hand out great scores to a lot of up-and-coming obscurities, but from looking at the top ten lists scattered across the web each year, it seems like the idea of an objective “best album of the year” is becoming more and more corporeal.

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Review: Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American

Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American

Only after several years can you begin to notice the influence a record has had. Some may say it takes foresight to know whether a record will become legendary, but there’s no way to really predict something like that. For this Retro Review project, we’re reviewing records that are a minimum of 10 years old – and with Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American celebrating its 10th birthday on July 18, I can’t think of a better place to start.

The “Class of ’01,” not to infringe on AltPress’ phrase or anything, is very impressive. Bleed American, however, might be my favorite record from that entire year, and it would certainly be on a list of my all-time favorites from the genre. Jimmy Eat World does have a sense of early-decade pop-punk on the album, but it’s infused with their now-unmistakable brand of angst-ridden emo, making it a pop-punk sound no other bands have successfully duplicated. Bleed American was the launching point for Jimmy Eat World’s commercial success as well, spawning multiple hit singles.

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Review: Jimmy Eat World – Invented

Jimmy Eat World - Invented

There has to be a plaque somewhere in Jimmy Eat World’s recording studio reading “With great power comes great responsibility.” A fitting mantra for more than Peter Parker’s web-slinging morality wars, when you’re one of the most dependable and profoundly influential rock bands on the planet, keeping your ears to the ground and never abandoning your legend is a heck of a responsibility. Harnessing their impeccable creative powers once again, Invented is a melting pot of Jimmy Eat World’s notoriously engaging rock music that showcases ample use of dedication, skill and intelligence over 50 minutes that will burn into your brain (with delight). Fight them off, they come back stronger. You can try to restrain the strength of Jim Adkins’ flawless vocals or even attempt to push the most talented rhythm section in alternative rock out of your way, but it’s no use. Jimmy Eat World has this down to a science and you would be hard-pressed to find this all much ado about nothing.

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Review: Jimmy Eat World – Futures

Jimmy Eat World - Futures

Sometimes on those cold late nights when the air coming from my body feels as if my soul is struggling to unleash itself from its shackles, I think of the words sung by Jimmy Eat World front man Jim Adkins on “Night Drive”: “You pierce my heart like a willing arm, your ticking makes my blood move.” Lines such as this, that sting immediately due to their poignancy and stark honesty fill the entire landscape that Jimmy Eat World’s landmark 2004 album Futures builds for itself and the listener.

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Review: Jimmy Eat World – Chase This Light

It’s a tough world out there for pop bands. In order to make the best of their lot, and appeal to the masses, they usually have to be billed as “guilty pleasures” or are forced to parade around under some genre hybridization for the sole sake of avoiding the dirty p-word. Yet somehow, through it all, Jimmy Eat World has managed to navigate through all of this fog and mudslinging to the point where they have transcended traditional criticisms. Perhaps it is because they are one of the few multi-platinum groups to still do club tours, or maybe just because they have so consistently upheld their own high standard for the past decade and a half. Either way, the band has attained a position of prominence in modern music and it is from this perch that they release their sixth studio album, Chase This Light.

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