Jimmy Eat World, Bleed American

One day in early 1999 I got the mail, and boy was I surprised to find a postcard announcing the release of the new Jimmy Eat World CD. My exact words at the time were, “Who’s that?”

Flash forward a week or two. It’s Wednesday night and I’m listening to the new music show on the modern rock channel. This really great song comes on, and then ends, and then it’s the DJ’s turn and what the DJ says is “That was Lucky Denver Mint by a band called Jimmy Eat World.”

I went to buy the CD, but I couldn’t find it anywhere except Hot Topic, which was selling it for 17 dollars (this was back in ‘99, mind you, before everybody’s CDs were 17 dollars). So I sort of forgot about them for a little while, only not really. Lucky Denver Mint showed up in commercials for Time Of Your Life, the Jennifer Love Hewitt show. And a few months later I found the CD, Clarity, for 99 cents. It ended up being my #6 song and #9 album for the year. Pretty good.

So apparently I wasn’t the only one who discovered them, because somehow they got themselves signed to Dreamworks, which explains how suddenly Bleed American, their title track from their new album, is all over the radio stations that just two years ago would only play them after midnight. Luckily, unlike most of what’s popular on modern rock radio right now (Weezer and Gorillaz excepted, of course) Jimmy Eat World actually deserve to be there. Bleed American, is a noisy pop song where singer JIm Adkins says things about how he’s not alone because he has the TV. It’s not deep or anything, but it’s near-perfect for what it is. The second song is even better. It’s about being twenty-five, at that weird in-between stage that Richard Linklater used to make movies about. Meanwhile Davey from the Promise Ring is on hand, to sing Crimson and Clover, Our House, and Don’t Let’s Start. Actually the first five tracks are all great, and if this were an EP it would probably be the best one I heard all year. But then somewhere around the sixth song, Hear You Me, things get a little sticky. Sappy, even. In fact, Hear You Me sounds very much like the Goo Goo Dolls. I mean, Diane Warren didn’t write it, and actually the girl back-up singer makes it less sappy, somehow, since the Goo Goo Dolls and Aerosmith would never let a girl sing on one of their ballads. But there's definitely a pretty big goopiness factor. The rest of the CD is sort of uneven, bouncing between the goopy (Cautioners) and the great (The Authority Song). All in all it’s a good CD, and like Clarity before it, it’s got a few really great songs on it. And, with Godhead and Drowning Pool seizing the airwaves, maybe, just maybe, buying a nice record like this will send programmers the right message, and pop will live again.

B+