Jimmy Eat World: Bleed American : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Sporting a dry, sunny crackle that befits their home base of Mesa, Arizona, Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle" is a great summer rock song that actually sounds like summer. Guitars click at a rapid clip; drums are punchy, actually danceable, not merely mosh-worthy. Jim Adkins' tenor delivers a hopeful message to a fallen friend, tension mounts, the chorus hesitates for a split second of silence and then pow! The track explodes into a pure pop heaven of cheery possibilities.

Moments like these reveal why Jimmy Eat World are Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge's favorite group (they recently played his wedding). This is a band of positive passion armed with an album of glorious potential hits. Bleed American's title track, bound to blow up a radio near you, is the best Nirvana-like tune since Kurt Cobain left this earth. Another churning cut, "Sweetness," runs a close second. Both conjure that shock of near-bubblegum catchiness, airtight ensemble attack and bittersweet mingling of anguish and uplifting melody that many bands fake but few can pull off. Better news is that the album boasts nine other tracks that don't sound anything like these two but are every bit as concisely designed and ardently delivered.

Jimmy Eat World come out of a scene that's been around for decades but is just now bubbling onto rock radio: emo. Emo, a.k.a. emo-core, has been around since the mid-Eighties, when introspective hardcore bands struggled to reverse punk's shrinking stylistic definitions. Instead of revolution and anarchy, emo bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate and the Promise Ring focus on personal turmoil, replacing bellows and bulldozing power chords with boyish yelps and intricate guitar arpeggios to reflect conflicted internal truths. Emo employs alternative rock's obligatory heavy guitars only in moments of sheer catharsis - a strategy that makes even more sense in 2001, a year when neometal bands wear their inner turmoil on their T-shirts. Emo remains a hazy category; Weezer have been recently lumped in with the sound, much to the chagrin of mainstream-wary scenesters. Similarly, any emo kid will tell you that Jimmy Eat World aren't emo, if only because Bleed American is their third major-label album.

But Bleed American sports the tender turbulence that insular emo kids have been enjoying in private for years, presented in a sure-shot package ready for Creed and Blink buyers, as well as anyone old or savvy enough to know New Wave's hooky delights. "All I need is just to hear a song I know," Jim Adkins pleads in "A Praise Chorus" before letting loose a string of lyric snippets quoting Tommy James, Madness, Motley Crue and more while channeling the Romantics on a collision course with the Ramones. Elsewhere, the band suggests early U2 on the slow-building balladry of "Your House," "Hear You Me" and "My Sundown"; the mechanical glow of "Cautioners" recalls the Cars; you can hear Cheap Trick in the nasal, high-pitched catchiness of "The Authority Song."

Whatever their influences, Jimmy Eat World retain emo's essential element: emotion. Using a disarming sensitivity, they speak to a youth culture frosted over by irony, prefab fun and knee-jerk belligerence. Jimmy Eat World favor technique over the unfocused outbursts of other emo bands, but their earnestness is breathtaking. "We once walked out on the beach, and once I almost touched your hand," Adkins admits in "If You Don't, Don't," invoking pop's eternal longing. Somehow he avoids being melodramatic - the only thing corny about this band is its typically emo name (although its acronym should adorn some kickass T-shirts). Jimmy Eat World have managed to be radical by just being sincere. And eleven killer songs don't hurt.

BARRY WALTERS
(RS 875 - August 16, 2001)