There is a long and illustrious list of rock acts who didn’t
\nreally get their musical act together until their third album,
\nincluding a pair of my favorites – Bruce Springsteen and Yes.
\nHowever,
\nClarity<\/i> is not Arizona punk-pop acolytes Jimmy Eat World’s
\nthird album. Rather, it is that troublesome beast, the sophomore
\nalbum, rife with adolescent growing pains, both scarred and
\nbeautiful.<\/p>\n
The band’s eventual third, self-titled album – the one featuring
\nthe monster hit single “The Middle” – makes
\nClarity<\/i> an intriguing historical artifact. And while this
\nalbum shows truckloads of potential, it fails a basic test: it
\ndoesn’t connect with the listener (at least, this one).<\/p>\n
Music, like most art forms, is about sharing a common
\nexperience. You have to recognize, if not yourself, at least some
\nemotion or situation that’s familiar in the work in order for it to
\nresonate with you. The ironically-named
\nClarity<\/i>‘s fatal flaw is this: it is stubbornly, even proudly
\nobscure. The lyrics might be described as stilted post-modern
\npseudo-poetry, full of arty non sequiturs that occasionally sound
\ncool, but whose impenetrability keep the listener firmly outside
\nthe songwriter’s creative box.<\/p>\n
The music – a large helping of Green Day, with a little Paul
\nMcCartney sprinkled over the top for seasoning — is where this
\nalbum gets more intriguing. Especially strong guitar lines and
\nvocal harmonies can be found on heavy tracks like “Lucky Denver
\nMint,” “Crush” and “Blister,” while quieter numbers like the
\nopening “Table For Glasses” and the very pretty “On A Sunday”
\nshimmer with bells and vibes. The band shows a gift for setting a
\nmood; it’s just unclear what a listener is ultimately supposed to
\nget out of a track like “12.23.95” (entire lyric: “Didn’t mean to
\nleave you hanging on. All alone. Merry Christmas baby.”). For some
\nreason the old Van Halen punchline comes to mind: “model citizen –
\nzero discipline.”<\/p>\n
The piece de resistance of misfires on this disc, though, has to
\nbe the sad little monster that is “Goodnight Sky Harbor.” You can
\nsense the band’s pent-up frustration melting through as they cut a
\nsixteen-minute closing opus that’s just about guaranteed to mystify
\nand\/or piss off anyone who listens. It starts off fine enough with
\na four-minute song that does a good job of summoning up a
\nnon-specific sense of melancholy. But then the lyric ends and it
\njust keeps going\u2026 and going\u2026 and going. The next
\neight minutes consist entirely of the same soft, simple chord
\nsequence repeated as if by a metronome. I know this stuff has now
\nbeen graced with its own genre name (trance), but come on, guys.
\nIt’d take three joints in a dark college dorm room for this kind of
\nbullshit to be remotely interesting. In the closing minutes they
\ntry a few things, adding background vocals, vibes and bells to the
\nmix, but it’s way too late and I’m way too annoyed by then. You
\nwant to play “Wouldn’t it be cool?” at 4 a.m. in the studio, do it
\non your own time.<\/p>\n
Those stumbles aside, you can hear the potential all over
\nClarity<\/i> in the band’s strong ear for melody and the
\njuxtaposition of gentle, earnest ballads with furious bursts of
\npunk energy. (The critics call this “emo,” but the phrase that
\ncomes to mind for me is “bipolar pop.”) They just seem to have been
\nso pissed off at their label at the time that whatever the suits
\ntold them, they did the opposite. A satisfying strategy in the
\nmoment, but pretty self-defeating if your true goal is to connect
\nwith an audience. Luckily for us, on the band’s third album
\n(initially called
\nBleed American<\/i>, self-titled after 9\/11) they put all the
\npieces together and produced one of the most melodic and accessible
\npunk-pop discs of the past few years.<\/p>\n
\nClarity<\/i> is an intriguing muddle of an album that’s worth
\npicking up. Just don’t buy it anticipating more than what it is – a
\nsometimes-beautiful mess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":26235,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6683],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-37456","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-jimmy-eat-world","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37456"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=37456"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=37456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}