Published on Aug 27, 2002
There is a long and illustrious list of rock acts who didn’t
really get their musical act together until their third album,
including a pair of my favorites – Bruce Springsteen and Yes.
However,
Clarity is not Arizona punk-pop acolytes Jimmy Eat World’s
third album. Rather, it is that troublesome beast, the sophomore
album, rife with adolescent growing pains, both scarred and
beautiful.
The band’s eventual third, self-titled album – the one featuring
the monster hit single “The Middle” – makes
Clarity an intriguing historical artifact. And while this
album shows truckloads of potential, it fails a basic test: it
doesn’t connect with the listener (at least, this one).
Music, like most art forms, is about sharing a common
experience. You have to recognize, if not yourself, at least some
emotion or situation that’s familiar in the work in order for it to
resonate with you. The ironically-named
Clarity‘s fatal flaw is this: it is stubbornly, even proudly
obscure. The lyrics might be described as stilted post-modern
pseudo-poetry, full of arty non sequiturs that occasionally sound
cool, but whose impenetrability keep the listener firmly outside
the songwriter’s creative box.
The music – a large helping of Green Day, with a little Paul
McCartney sprinkled over the top for seasoning — is where this
album gets more intriguing. Especially strong guitar lines and
vocal harmonies can be found on heavy tracks like “Lucky Denver
Mint,” “Crush” and “Blister,” while quieter numbers like the
opening “Table For Glasses” and the very pretty “On A Sunday”
shimmer with bells and vibes. The band shows a gift for setting a
mood; it’s just unclear what a listener is ultimately supposed to
get out of a track like “12.23.95” (entire lyric: “Didn’t mean to
leave you hanging on. All alone. Merry Christmas baby.”). For some
reason the old Van Halen punchline comes to mind: “model citizen –
zero discipline.”
The piece de resistance of misfires on this disc, though, has to
be the sad little monster that is “Goodnight Sky Harbor.” You can
sense the band’s pent-up frustration melting through as they cut a
sixteen-minute closing opus that’s just about guaranteed to mystify
and/or piss off anyone who listens. It starts off fine enough with
a four-minute song that does a good job of summoning up a
non-specific sense of melancholy. But then the lyric ends and it
just keeps going… and going… and going. The next
eight minutes consist entirely of the same soft, simple chord
sequence repeated as if by a metronome. I know this stuff has now
been graced with its own genre name (trance), but come on, guys.
It’d take three joints in a dark college dorm room for this kind of
bullshit to be remotely interesting. In the closing minutes they
try a few things, adding background vocals, vibes and bells to the
mix, but it’s way too late and I’m way too annoyed by then. You
want to play “Wouldn’t it be cool?” at 4 a.m. in the studio, do it
on your own time.
Those stumbles aside, you can hear the potential all over
Clarity in the band’s strong ear for melody and the
juxtaposition of gentle, earnest ballads with furious bursts of
punk energy. (The critics call this “emo,” but the phrase that
comes to mind for me is “bipolar pop.”) They just seem to have been
so pissed off at their label at the time that whatever the suits
told them, they did the opposite. A satisfying strategy in the
moment, but pretty self-defeating if your true goal is to connect
with an audience. Luckily for us, on the band’s third album
(initially called
Bleed American, self-titled after 9/11) they put all the
pieces together and produced one of the most melodic and accessible
punk-pop discs of the past few years.
Clarity is an intriguing muddle of an album that’s worth
picking up. Just don’t buy it anticipating more than what it is – a
sometimes-beautiful mess.