Jimmy Eat World: Futures : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Three years ago, when Jimmy Eat World were just taking off, singer-guitarist Jim Adkins mused, "Maybe people will stop calling us an emo band now." Sorry, buddy! You're so still an emo band! Yet, if it's any consolation, at this late date, emo just means you're a punk-rock band that does songs about making out in cars. Jimmy Eat World ride their bighearted radio rock into O.C.-worthy teen turmoil on Futures, their fifth and finest album. These four childhood friends have come a long way despite their unfashionable home base of Mesa, Arizona, and one of the most awful band names in history, with unabashedly sentimental pop-punk tunes that aim for the upper-register quaver in Adkins' voice. All over Futures they sing about teen heartbreak, cherry lipstick, hotel bars, drugs and turning twenty-three. They also sing about making out in cars. Jimmy Eat World have beefed up the sound of their 2001 breakthrough hit, Bleed American, which was hastily retitled Jimmy Eat World after 9/11. They've still got the high-energy guitars and the misery-laden vocals. But the songs are longer and trickier, building from mellow acoustic passages to the slam-dunk choruses of "Pain," "Just Tonight . . . " and "The World You Love." The band's richer sound can be attributed to new producer Gil Norton, an architect of the loud-quiet-loud template with the Pixies (Doolittle), Foo Fighters (The Colour and the Shape) and Dashboard Confessional (A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar). But it also sounds like they've been listening to their old Echo and the Bunnymen records.

Jimmy Eat World stick to their favorite topic here: the feelings of misfit kids trying to make a connection while they plot their escape from the lonesome towns where they're stuck. Adkins never sounds like a con man, which matters a lot in angst-ridden tunes such as "Pain." His voice cracks over hook lines such as "I taste you all over my teeth" ("Just Tonight . . . ") or "Keep me somewhere the drugs don't go" ("Drugs or Me"). The excellent "Work" sounds just like Liz Phair's "Divorce Song," so it's cool that Phair appears on background vocals, even if you can't really hear her through the wall of guitars. "Polaris" has frosty guitar ache that sounds like a cross between Pavement's "Frontwards" and Def Leppard's "Hysteria," which is definitely a compliment.

"Night Drive" is the big climactic power ballad, and what can you say: Did the world really need another song about lost innocence in a leased Hyundai? Yes, apparently. Adkins even brought along some blankets in the back seat -- what a smoothie! "Night Drive" has some teeth-gnashingly bad lines ("Come alive on the driver's side" -- you gotta be kidding), but the falsetto hook and acoustic riff make it a pretty great song anyway. If it seems incongruous that these guys sing about dashboard-lighting it up while they're pushing thirty in real life, it's even weirder that the two catchiest rockers on Futures, "Just Tonight . . . " and "Work," are explicit prom songs about looking for romance at the high school dance. Jimmy Eat World have an adult side that's waiting to be explored -- they even cover one of Guided by Voices' best songs, "Game of Pricks," on the new indie compilation Future Soundtrack for America. But when they do teen angst as handsomely as they do it on Futures, who needs an adult side?