Review Summary: In defense of nostalgia eclipsing any and all common sense
I won't act like the first time I heard
Invented it blew me away. I was a little confused why Matthew Bellamy seemed to have muscled his way into the studio to do the chorus of "Higher Devotion", why they didn't just put "Stop" on
Chase this Light, and why the acoustic versions of "Coffee and Cigarettes" and "Mixtape" were so totally sucky and lame (that last complaint, by the way, still stands). It might have been the fourth or fifth time through that the subtleties started to announce themselves: the way "Invented" and "Mixtape" mirror each other, one the most perfect portrait of love while the other wallows in bitterness; the heavenly choir that descended to our plane just to record the bridge of "Cut"; little snatches of lyrics here and there that seemed to have departed, fully formed, from my subconscious and arrived straight onto the record in front of me.
"Invented" is the greatest Jimmy Eat World song. It forsakes the polished gleam of
Bleed American for something close to
Clarity's raw charm, but whilst that record dwells in slightly cheesy metaphors "Invented" cuts straight to the bone. Oh, it's not like you haven't heard the story a million times, but you've never heard it told like this: Adkins' lyrics are so vivid you can actually feel the temperature dropping in your room as some dick rolls up in a suit outside. Courtney Marie Andrews' contributions go so far beyond backing vocals, as she brings the song to life just as much as Adkins does, their slight discrepancies in timing crystallising the theme of two lovers pulling together, and away, and together again. Then you have that explosion into the bridge, which frankly is just really f
ucking awesome. Not to ignore the rest of the album here; it's as refreshing to hear Tom Linton finally bust out his vocal chops again as it is surprising to hear Jim writing from the female perspective, a trick to which his delicate and brutally honest lyricism lends itself generously. "Heart is Hard to Find" drops the band's only f-bomb in their only country-inspired song, for a laugh really, while "Littlething" makes liberal use of a stunning piano refrain for Adkins to drop a selection of his finest couplets.
There was a time this album was the soundtrack to my life. By that, I don't mean that it played as I stood in the pouring rain outside some girl's window, or made an inspiring anti-establishment statement of identity Breakfast Club-style. I mean it literally;
Invented was the big moments
and all the spaces in between, moments that no self-respecting artist would consciously bother soundtracking, ambiguous and fleeting and undramatic and not really one thing or the other. I don't really listen to
Invented that much anymore; post-high school me is too busy pretending to be an
artiste and systematically cataloguing Pink Floyd b-sides so I can brag about having listened to them all. But every now and then, there's just a part of me that just wants to hear a list of things Jim Adkins can't compete with. So I hit play, and I sit back, and I 5
Invented on sputnikmusic and re-live those gorgeously horrible days for about 51 minutes or so.
"It was always half invented, but the other half was good"
