Reviews

Jimmy Eat World’s previous album “Bleed American” on Dreamworks never was reviewed here, and that’s pretty weird because in fact I really love quite a few songs on that album. But I have to admit it, that time it was my girlfriend who spoonfed it to me, because even now it’s one of those albums she often grabs from my collection to play. She’s got the bad habit to play a song she likes for about 100 times in a row, and managed to get me into all the hitsingles that came off that album. But I definitely didn’t like the entire album, there were just too many smooth songs on it for me to call it a masterpiece. So now it’s been 3 years since that release, and here they are back on Interscope with this 11 song album that offers that same mixture of hitsingles and moody songs. Although they removed Mark Trombino from the production seat somewhere in the middle of the recording process to have him replaced by Gil Norton (Foo Fighters, Dashboard Confessional, The Distillers) the sound hasn’t altered that much in my opinion. OK, maybe the sound became even more spiced up with piano-intermezzo’s, cello’s, tambourines and all that atmospheric pooha, but there’s nothing that could destroy the incredibly warm vocals or the intelligent song-writing of this band. JEW is maybe the most mentioned influencial band in these times with all the (what I tend to call them) “indie-rock” bands that I have become a bit fed up with lately. What some of these bands seem to neglect, is that there’s need for sparks of energy once and while to keep people like me awake and alert of what’s going on all the way through the album. JEW sparks quite bright! Although it has to be said that there’s some dreamery moments here as well (“Drugs Or Me”, “23”), but I have slightly less problems with them here thanks to the vocals that really go well with that emotional music. And a song like “Polaris” that at first reminded me of U2, in the end has quite a good more powerful chorus to remain focused.Anyway, I just tend to skip these songs that are mostly in the second part of the album (although the more grooving and guitar-twisting “Nothingwrong” is not bad either), to leave me with about 6 songs that go from good to extremely astonishing quality, with “Futures”, “Just Tonight” and “Pain” being the absolute hights of the album to me thanks to the more poppy yet energetic parts in them, at times added with some inventive inbetween guitars. The continuous flowing of these songs is really unmatched by any other band in this brand, and all three songs are potential hitsongs if you ask me. There’s some pretty elaborated, sometimes weirdy squeaky backing vocals in the song “The World You Love” that along with the good tempo percussion makes it a song that I like as well. “Night Drive” is a song that has this strange sound of a xylophone which makes it quite enjoyable.I’d like to give this album a 95% score for the uptempo songs and for this guy’s voice. But I can’t, because this is a review for an entire album, so I have to take all these songs in consideration and (un)fortunately I’m just not that emotional person that can dream away listening to an album like maybe some of you can. I’m pretty sure though that in a few years time my girlfriend is still grabbing this one out of my collection, and my guess is that the numerous featurings on radio and TV will have helped her noticing it by then (guest review by Hein from punkupdates.com).