Jimmy Eat World – Futures
(Interscope)

Jimmy Eat World are one of those bands that you either hate to love or love to hate. For me, they’ve always been a bit of a guilty pleasure. I can listen to their albums on repeat for an entire day only to wake up the next morning feeling used and ashamed. As their commercial success continues and their songs start to overload airwaves and saturate media outlets everywhere, it is becoming harder and harder to call yourself a fan of Jimmy Eat World and still feel good about it.

For one thing, the vague and divisive emo trend has for the most part died out, to the point where no one dares utter the word anymore for fear of garnering strange looks from their peers. The upshot to this is that bands like Jimmy Eat World can no longer hide beneath the veil of being sensitive indie rock heroes.Instead they are exposed for what they really are: sugar-coated power pop pushers who sound equally at home on middle-of-the-road easy listening radio stations as they are on the hip modern rock stations.But the fact of the matter is, you can’t fault them for being so damn accessible, especially when they’ve never claimed to be anything else.They still sound exactly the same as they have since day one, only now they’re privileged enough to have slicker production and a lot more people listening.

If you haven’t yet heard Futures, it should come as no surprise that the album picks up pretty close to where Bleed American left off. It’s hard to imagine a Jimmy Eat World album without the same crunchy guitars, breathy, delicate vocals, and bubblegum choruses. As always, the lyrics are pretty cheesy and generic, but in typical J.E.W. fashion every song has a hook or riff that will make your forget that you ever questioned them in the first place. You wouldn’t even know that they changed producers on this album unless someone told you. Gil Norton replaces Mark Trombino behind the dials this time around — Norton being the man who recorded most of The Pixies’ discography, and, more appropriately, a bunch of Catherine Wheel and Foo Fighters stuff.

The first half of the album finds the band forgetting their gentler side and concentrating on the rock. From the chugging guitars of the title track and the straight-ahead scorcher “Jen”, to the jangly Liz Phair-backed “Work”, and the album’s addictive first single “Pain”, there is a lot of stand out material here. Some of the songs seem to be ushering in a new era of arena rock considering the abundance of fist-pumping choruses and prominent vocal harmonies. The album even has a lot of solid guitar solos, while “The World You Love” shamelessly cops a Lita Ford riff and turns it into an extended “woah-oh” sing along.

Strangely, the album’s least memorable moments come from the points when they turn down the guitars and get all sappy on us, which historically speaking has been a strong point for the band. With epic slow songs like “For Me This Is Heaven” and “Cautioners” on past albums, you have to wonder what caused them to stumble this time around. “Drugs For Me”, a 6 minute ballad about a strung-out friend, lacks the guitar sheen needed to blind listeners to the lyrical cheesiness, while the 7 minute closer “23″ incorporates string arrangements and dreamy guitars but seems to be missing that essential catchy refrain. It doesn’t help that all the slower songs are concentrated towards the latter half of the record, unbalancing the overall flow.

Truthfully, the only real problem I have with Futures is that it is an album we’re all going to hear over and over again — whether we buy it or not. Even though I certainly don’t have anything against accessible music in and of itself, the problem comes when a song gets rammed down your throat until you want to vomit. I could see almost all of these songs becoming radio singles at some point, and while Bleed American stood up well to repetition, only time will tell if Futures has the same intangible qualities. My early impression is that Futures is not nearly as indispensable, and yet it may see Jimmy Eat World reach an unwieldy level of exposure. Here’s to hoping things don’t get too out of hand… I really don’t want to hate this album because I like it too damn much. — Sean