Jimmy Eat World

• Year: 2001
• Rating: 8/10
• Cat. No: 450 348-2

Track listing:

1. Salt Sweat Sugar
2. A Praise Chorus
3. The Middle
4. Your House
5. Sweetness
6. Hear You Me
7. If You Don’t, Don’t
8. Get It Faster
9. Cautioners
10. The Authority Song
11. My Sundown

Ten years on from the apex of grunge, there is a new breed of come-as-you-are US band dominating the alt.rock landscape. Some, such as Nickelback, are currently as ubiquitous as they are interminably tedious, while the fratboy likes of Blink 182 slug it out with Papa Roach for the Highschool vote, and only the prospect of a limited shelf life to look forward to. It’s become the soundtrack for endless teen movies and TV series, none of which are complete without the sound of angst-ridden whiny vocals pitted against an invigorated guitar and drums onslaught.

Jimmy Eat World fit in with this particular phenomenon, but they have more to offer than most. Rather than subscribe to the quiet/loud/quiet/loud (ad infinitum) approach that Kurt Cobain patented over a decade ago, Jimmy Eat World’s songs are, beneath the occasionally grunge-lite trappings, cut from the same taut, economic powerpop cloth that made The Police such a force in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and which Goo Goo Dolls have also appropriated in recent years.

While Salt Sweat Sugar (a.k.a. Bleed American, the title track of this album in its original, pre-September 11 incarnation) and Get It Faster blend in perfectly with the stereotypical intensity of their grungier peers, it’s the pure melodic rush of The Middle, If You Don’t Don’t and Your House that best showcase their neo-new wave strengths, and way with a winning tune.

A dozen tracks in that vein, however, would soon lose its appeal, and luckily Jimmy Eat World has a handful of downtempo gems that, if anything, surpass the blasts of powerpop. Hear You Me, Cautioners, and the closing My Sundown are lovely things, laced with chiming guitars and the celestial melancholia that characterises the best by Goo Goo Dolls. Indeed, these three songs are right up there alongside Iris and Black Balloon, eclipsing anything on the Goo Goo’s below-par Gutterflower album from earlier this year.

Clocking in at a fat-free 45 minutes, with a straightforwardly effective cover of John Mellencamp‘s Authority Song to augment their own compositions, Jimmy Eat World is a supreme example of modern pop-rock.

Feeling hungry? Satisfy yourself with this.