Three years after their commercial breakthrough, Bleed American, Jimmy Eat World's fifth full-length represents what I hope is the final stage in emo's devolution. The songs have deep titles like "Work", "Kill", and "Pain". They're about girls, girls, and (possibly) painkillers. They range from ponderous ballads ("Drugs or Me") to navel-gazing, midtempo tunes (the title track) to rockers that sound like watered-down versions of the band's earlier rockers ("Nothing Wrong", "Just Tonight"). I guess you could call "Night Drive", with its late-period Folk Implosion beats, an example of a band "maturing." But then singer/guitarist Jim Adkins opens his mouth: "Do you feel bad like I feel bad?"
Lyrically, the rest of the album isn't much better. To a drug-addled lover, Adkins croons, "Stay with me/ You're the one I need." To an apathetic lover: "Your votes can mean something." To an easy lover: "Lay back, baby, and we'll do this right." To no one in particular: "Baby, this is who I am/ Sorry, but I can't just go turn off how I feel." If that's not bad enough, he even conjures the least-poetic expression of jealous ever: "I'm sure your kiss remains employed."
Things haven't always been quite this bad from Jimmy Eat World. The best moments on earlier albums such as Static Prevails and Clarity weren't Shakespeare, but they communicated universes of longing to awkward kids. "The Middle" is also an obscenely catchy bit of pop, despite the greater indie community's cred-conscious dismissal of it. But there's none of that here. Futures is like a rotten onion, revealing layer upon layer of foulness. Musically, Jimmy Eat World have gone overboard with the trick they learned from U2: keep something somewhere jingling the same notes over and over again. Adkins' vocals are as whiny as ever, but here they sound canned as well. And then there's the would-be hipster nod to Heatmiser's "Not Half Right" on the swooning Smallville balladry of "Kill" ("like your favorite Heatmiser song said/ It's just like being alone"). Elliott Smith's only been dead for a year, guys-- a little respect, please.
"I'm in love with the ordinary," Adkins acknowledges on "The World You Love". That's not necessarily a bad thing; one of the year's finest album's, The Streets' A Grand Don't Come for Free, is kicked off by nothing more earth-shattering than a broken TV. Yet there's a difference between romanticizing the ordinary-- a bad cell phone connection, say, or that feeling on a first date that goes really, really well-- and being, well, ordinary. And it's hard to think of an album more mundane than Futures.
