"Hey."
"Hey, I got a music question for you."
"OK, shoot."
"OK, so have you ever heard of Jimmy Eat World?"
"Yes! I love that band. They are probably my favorite band."
"Dude! Yeah me too. Like, Bleed American is so good, man."
...
end conversation.
So, you say you like Jimmy Eat World. You say you jumped on before they were ALL BIG. You got into them before they made the decision to change "Bleed American" to "Jimmy Eat World" because of post 9/11 sympathies. You heard "The Middle" and you liked it before the video, before the radio play, before everyone else saw them in concert. Well guess what. You're a poser.
You're a poser like your dad's love for the C3 Corvette. You're a poser like Christian butt rock. You're a weirdo who tried to be cool. You got left in the dust because the 90's weren't with you like you were with them. You were watching "Hey! Arnold" because it was on T.V., not because it was transcendent. You were sitting in the bathroom picking your nose in the stall. You were not listening to Clarity.
Clarity.
Now, I'll be honest and say this up front: I discovered Futures before any other Jimmy Eat World album came to my ears. I discovered them because my friend Nathaniel told me they were good. He had the "deluxe edition" and I had a CD player so I just borrowed the thing for nigh-near two years, just to give it back scratched and well-worn. Thanks Nathaniel.
McDaniel had this protomillenial habit of collecting myriads of burned CDs with low-fi MP3 tracks from all sorts of crap audio on it. Remember when the iPod was not a household name back in 2005? That's when we were burning CDs and dealing with the awful two-second pause in between tracks, because both iTunes and Windows Media Player were pathetic and weren't interested in giving us the full experience. We had to be economic. You had 80 minutes and it was a waste to use less than all 80 revolutions of the second hand. We weren't torrenting. Some of us had dial-up. We had to burn our stuff to laser disks because upload speeds were in the 128-768kbps range and we had time limits on how much we could use the computer. We were using MSN messenger. Or AOL. or Yahoo.
And myspace. oh myspace.
So anyway, Nathaniel gave me one of those plastic holders that came holding fifty blank CD-Rs, and he gave it to me with about fifty used CD-Rs. There's a long list of bands I could be thanking Nathaniel for, but really, this is about Clarity. This is about the time I discovered a CD full of Jimmy Eat World tracks and most of them were from Clarity. This is about the time I got used to the inevitable skipping that comes with the peeling surface of cheap CD-Rs. This is about the time when I discovered my favorite album and couldn't drop it.
No, I've carried Clarity with me for years.
So eventually I was able to scrounge up a couple bucks and find Clarity at Barnes and Noble. It was miraculous. Fifteen year-old me found an album he had been wanting since he heard the first couple tracks off of it. All the redbook audio quality. No more track skipping.
Enter "Table For Glasses." The beauty of the first track is its understatement. In fact. Clarity is an album of understatements. The first track is just the understatement of the album of understatements. It's the breaking voice in the middle of "hello". It's the gasp for air after you've exhaled and delayed breathing. It isn't so much deep as it is wide. That's not to say that Clarity lacks depth. But you have to get past the second syllable of the proverbial understatement to get anywhere. It takes a certain kind of viligence to keep listening for the subtlety.
You get to the first single of the song "Lucky Denver Mint". The chorus sings
You're not bigger than this
I'm not really certain why this song got the "single". I'm not sure that there's any song here that really commands radio time. And that's alright. That's part of the charm.
"Your New Aesthetic" comes on and suddenly you're anti-nostalgiating forward to "Nothing Wrong", the only RADIO PUNK on Futures. This is the roots of the angry political JEW that we've all come to know or skip tracks.
"Believe in What You Want" is probably the only track I ever consider skipping. Why? I don't know. It's just as good as the others. I just have impossible standards.
"A Sunday" -- Now here's where the album gets good. Here's where the album goes from standard emo father fare to underproduced beauty. From this point forward, the album goes uphill and fast. You've survived the last three songs just to get to this one. You've pulled up to the top of the coaster and you're on the brink of heading to oblivion.
"Crush" -- The second "Believe in What You Want" but twice as good. It's got the typical Mark Trombino flare you find everywhere. It's because of tracks and albums like this that got me into Drive Like Jehu (Trombino drums for them).
12.23.95 - Merry Christmas, baby - Enough said.
"Ten" -- The trifecta begins with the under-the-table whiskey drink song. Listen to the chorus. Listen to the piano. Listen to the drums. Listen to the beat. The syncopation. And then listen to Blame no one. Blame no one.
"Just Watch The Fireworks" -- The second of the sweet trilogy. I'm always stuck between this song and the next for "best song ever". This song has the exposition of musical themes. Strings. That epic Jimmy Eat World build-up stolen by many a worship drummer years over.
"For Me This Is Heaven" -- The prestige. The reveal. The heart swoon. The nail in the coffin which drives in home this thought "Yes, this is the best Jimmy Eat World Album Ever." So famous is the chorus line that the re-master released in 2007 featured the lyric on the CD front.
"Blister" -- Good ol' rocking Jimmy Eat World.
"Clarity" -- The one before the big one.
"Goodbye Sky Harbor" -- The one that puts you to sleep. I don't mean that in a bad way. It goes from emo, to alternative-ish... to synthesizers. To the fade-out. It takes 13 minutes and you shouldn't ask for it back.
__
It's not my typical to do any track-by-track. I'm not even sure the above is good advice or good descriptions. But I swear this is my favorite album.
Lots of other bands that I like have made three albums in a row that correspond with the Jimmy Eat World format.
There's the Clarity, the underproduced one that sounds perfect, but only in practice. It doesn't make sense until you've listened to that album as whole, and it cements itself as your favorite because this is the one where you suddenly see everything clearly.
Then there's the Bleed American, the one that everyone likes. The one with all the singles. The one that warrants the most track skips because you really only care about the singles. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah, "Bleed American" is one of the hardest songs ever, bro. Nobody cares.
Lastly, there's Futures, the one that everyone should like. The one with all the brains. The one that somehow perfectly engineered the production process to keep all authenticity inward and all the pretension and pop-sensibility away. The one that you know should really be your favorite, but you wouldn't call it the "best" album.
See, bands like Death Cab For Cutie, and Sufjan Stevens have albums that fit under these. Not necessarily in the same release orders.
Clarity - Transatlanticism - Seven Swans
Bleed American - Plans - Illinois
Futures - Narrow Stairs - Michigan
I think about it now.
Just ignore that guy that says things like "Static Prevails was the best Jimmy Eat World album, and I really only listen to the Photo album. And Enjoy Your Rabbit was back when Sufjan was real."
I never really have gotten over Clarity. It's the album that started me down understated drums. It's the album that stopped me from listening to emo-pop (with few exceptions like Taking Back Sunday). It's the album that stopped me from thinking about death and more about learning to live. Futures was all about dying to me. A guy from high school named David passed and all I could listen to was "Pain" and "23" and think about growing old. Clarity was really about learning to live with consequences. Learning to move on. I guess I haven't learned that lesson yet.
Nick
