jimmy eat world - chase this light

It must be a pain in the ass to score a monster Top 10 hit, as Jimmy Eat World did with "The Middle" in 2001. They followed the platinum-selling "Bleed American" with the consistently engaging "Futures", but the album fell quickly after debuting in the Top 10 itself, the highest charting single ("Pain") making it only as far as #93 on the charts.

The band had seemingly fallen prey to their own success, spawning what seemed like a million sound-alike bands that clogged the airwaves so that the very originators of the genre couldn't even be heard.

Three years later, the band has returned with "Chasing The Light".

I will admit to allowing my promo copy to gather some dust before finally giving it a spin. While I had found little to dislike about "Futures", my general feeling was that I wasn't listening to a Jimmy Eat World record as much as an approximation of the band's aesthetic created by the makers of the latest Grand Theft Auto video game.

I will also admit that the album art struck me as being too similar to XTC's Homespun CD.

Thus, it wasn't until a few days ago that I popped the CD in for the first time and, well, I'm still listening.

In other words, the album's a grower.

As seems to be quite commonplace these days, the CD is front-loaded with juggernaut anthems like the caffeine-fueled "Big Casino", finally letting up on the elegiac "Gotta Be Somebody's Blues"; a song that shows the band breaking from the template long enough to create a song that is, in a word, magical.

Truth be told, there isn't one song on the CD that struck me as sub-par. If anything, the pristine production tends to rob many of the songs of their humanity. I can't help think that a heavy reliance on ProTools has resulted in an album that is meticulous to a fault. The walls of guitars that have always been my favorite component of the Jimmy Eat World sound are now compressed to the point of minimizing their impact and sometimes one is hard-pressed to imagine they were actually played by a living, breathing person.

All in all, that's a minor complaint because, as mentioned, the songs are solid throughout and the fact that you don't have to be a clumsy, lovestruck kid to connect with the lyrics is eternally refreshing. The verses from "Big Casino" struck me as being amazingly poignant to those of us who are starting to wear our scars a little less proudly:

"Before this world starts up again, it's me and night
We wait for the sun, the kids and drunks head back inside.
Well, there's lots of smart ideas in books I've never read
When the girls come talk to me I wish to hell I had...

Back when I was younger, I was someone you'd have liked.
Got an old guitar I've had for years I'd let you buy
And I'll tell you something else that you ain't died enough to know
There's still some living left when your prime comes and goes."

Thus, while the ever-fickle emo crowd seems to have moved on to some new band with a paragraph of gibberish for a name, I can't help think there's a huge audience waiting to be turned on to this album, but that preconceptions may prevent such a thing from ever taking place.

So, if you count yourselves among those who've written off Jimmy Eat World, for whatever reason, I urge you to give this one a listen.


Big Casino
Gotta Be Somebody's Blues
Dizzy