Jim Adkins had written himself off. Judging from the open letter announcing Integrity Blues, the Jimmy Eat World frontman had spent the band’s first-ever hiatus soul-searching. For 15 years, Jimmy Eat World had been judged against their self-help smash hit “The Middle,” and this past April, Taylor Swift gave it a signal boost with an uncomfortably mixed message: “I used to listen to this in middle school!” The expansive, emotionally weathered Integrity Blues sounds nothing like “The Middle,” but it’s perhaps their best record since then on account of being its unlikely spiritual sequel.
It does feel odd praising Adkins for taking the initiative to actually write about himself, given Jimmy Eat World’s status to many as emo’s quintessential band. But unlike the other songwriters responsible for breaking emo onto alt-rock radio in early ’00s, Adkins never created a persona that made him inextricable from his music, allowing the audience rather than the author to inhabit the role of the narrator—this is why Clarity and Bleed American have aged much better than unearthed LiveJournals like The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most or Deja Entendu. But after Bleed American redeemed Jimmy Eat World commercially, their albums have been increasingly self-conscious and reactionary: the blue-black millennial malaise of Futures led to the peacocking radio-rock of Chase This Light; the band reunited with Clarity and Bleed American producer/donut innovator Mark Trombino for Invented, an ambitious and uneven collection of character sketches inspired by Cindy Sherman and Hannah Starkey photography. It led to another precipitous drop in sales and was followed by the streamlined Damage, pitched as an “adult breakup record,” but sounding complacent and AOR enough to soundtrack a date night movie at AMC Cinema.
Their new partnership with Justin Meldal-Johnsen on Integrity Blues is both sensible and inspired: he’s worked on recent records for Paramore and Tegan and Sara, acts with emo foundations who are unrepentantly making rewarding pop now and Jimmy Eat World is as much a pop act as Carly Rae Jepsen is emo. Meldal-Johnsen is perhaps best known as the producer and bassist for M83—a band that sounds little like Jimmy Eat World, but still uses “can you still feel the butterflies” as an operating artistic principle, creating fantastical safe spaces in which teenage melodrama is a life-sustaining renewable resource rather than an escape.
At least from a production standpoint, Integrity Blues is the exact opposite of what the title promises: it’s a complete fabrication of a four-person rock band, a proudly produced record where barely anything sounds like it does in its natural state. The guitar that opens “You With Me” is almost comically opulent, like a harp strung with liquid crystal and wrapped in icicle lights. Falsetto harmonies channel an ultralight beam through stained glass, sounding closer to the synth-prog hosannahs of Mew or Passion Pit. Every element of Zach Lind’s drum set is tweaked with crackling EQ and Rick Burch’s bass is a pulsating synth bubble. And yet the modesty that would often dulled and sanitized Chase This Light and Damage provides necessary heft on Integrity Blues. “You With Me” still feels like four guys in a room.
Integrity Blues is in the exquisite, crystalline mold of “Polaris” or “Ten” and they’ve never successfully spent the majority of any album in this mode until now. The rumbling exposition of “Sure and Certain” and its choral liftoff nods back at professed superfans Chvrches, “It Matters” is unusually slinky and guitar-free, “Pretty Grids” is damn near translucent. Elsewhere, they prove deft and evoking their past glory without rehashing it: actual adult breakup ballad “The End Is Beautiful” is a crossbreed of “Hear You Me” and“Cautioners,” and Jimmy Eat World can still write spring-loaded, major-third melodies (“Through”) and add to their flawless run of 6+-minute epics (closer “Pol Roger” is “23”going on 40).
The deceptively worded “You With Me” (“what makes our love so hard to be/is it you or is that you with me?”) is also indicative of Adkins’ subtle and progressive growth as a lyricist. Freed from the narrative strictures that Damage and Invented couldn’t support, Integrity Blues unpacks an adulthood spent “destination addicted,” whether the arrival is financial, romantic or even emotional success. At times, it’s almost like he’s ripping up the lyric sheets of his past—20 years after “Episode IV” promised a chance to dance all night, Adkins sneers, “But that’s something we never do...there’s my dream, doesn’t that sound good to you?” “Our weakness is the same, we need poison sometimes,” went the refrain on Clarity’s intoxicating “Ten”; Integrity Blues' frostbitten title track declares, “no one’s making you spend lonely nights poisoned through and through.”
Even in his less resolute days, Adkins was always a try-hard type, and and his new bootstraps mentality can aggravate that impulse: the thematically impenetrable “Pass the Baby” creeps from a monotone, no-fi electronic lurch to math-rock pummeling, a reminder that Adkins once branded himself a Jesus Lizard ripoff artist and proof that menace and obscurity are the opposite of what they’re good at. Lead single “Get Right” serves as Integrity Blues’ thesis (“disguised as patience, time gets wasted”), but it's probably the least compelling Jimmy Eat World single ever released.
It’s immediately followed by one of their best; “You Are Free” is earnest and comforting, on the edge of cloying, and unabashedly anthemic—like all of Jimmy Eat World’s best songs, it tells you what you need to hear right when you’re vulnerable enough to hear it. “Amazing the emotional bridges, tunnels, roads and ways we go around what’s one step from our face,” Adkins sings. “You Are Free” echoes the sentiments of “The Middle,” but not its belief that “everything will be alright”—it can be, if you’re willing to accept your responsibility.
Though Jimmy Eat World hasn’t had much part in the ongoing renaissance of emo—in fact, some of it may be a reaction to what Bleed American hath wrought—Integrity Blues finds itself sharing its dominant concern of using the genre’s inherent vulnerability and introspection to promote self-esteem rather than self-pity. Summarizing his view of integrity, Adkins sings, “It’s all what you do when no one cares,” on the title track, written during a brief solo tour where he played to small crowds in bars and churches in places like Billings, MT and Maquoketa, IA. It’s indicative of Integrity Blues’ diamond-cut polish that this is the rawest thing here—while Adkins is backed by tearful Sigur Rós strings, his vocals are completely unadorned, possibly even first-take. It just took some time, but we’re finally hearing what Adkins has to say for himself.
