Review Summary: Almost nothing about Invented is immediately rewarding, but with patience you will find that the album is sincere, reflective, and every bit as emotionally expressive as the band’s past endeavors.
Jimmy Eat World has gone through an interesting evolution over the past ten years. They began the decade as emerging pop-punkers, fresh off the newfound recognition that accompanied 1999’s breakthrough effort,
Clarity.
Bleed American launched them into the national spotlight with hits like “The Middle” and “Sweetness”, before they explored more of an alternative, moody rock sound with
Futures. While the latter two albums are generally regarded as the band’s best work, 2007’s
Chase this Light saw them fully realize their pop capabilities, creating perhaps their catchiest and most accessible music to date. So where does that leave
Invented? On the surface it seems mostly bland, with only a few attention grabbing tracks and an overabundance of slow burners and ballads. But as any long time fan of Jimmy Eat World knows, there
has to be more to it.
Invented has all the classic signs of a “grower.” Outside of the single “My Best Theory” (and maybe “Coffee and Cigarettes”), there are not many songs that have the quick and pleasing appeal that we have all come to expect from Jimmy Eat World. The opening track “Heart is Hard to Find” progresses slowly to a background of hand claps and basic acoustic strumming. Jim Adkins keeps things afloat early with beautifully contemplative lyrics:
I can’t compete with the clear eyes of strangers
I’m more and more replaced by my friends each night
I can’t compete, I just can’t recover
How many years it’s been
It’s one day in my mind
The song gradually picks up the pace, with the eventual entrance of violins, chimes, and weightier drum beats. Not unlike the album itself, “Heart is Hard to Find” becomes more and more impressive the longer you let it play on. The song is a surprising gem on an album with more little, meaningful moments than grandiose, sing along choruses. “Evidence”, “Cut”, and “Littlething” all succeed along the same lines, albeit to a lesser extent. As with most of the slower tracks on the album, these songs rely heavily on Adkins’ emotional vocal delivery. They also manage to effectively introduce each instrument, build to a climactic moment (which is often something other than the chorus on
Invented) to create an ebb and flow feel. “Cut”, for example, begins with slow, intermittent guitar strumming while a distant organ adds a sense of urgency from the song’s background. Echoing drum beats come crashing in just after, giving the listener the feeling that something incredibly meaningful is about to transpire. The same song structure is applied to the album’s closing tracks, “Invented” and “Mixtape”, both of which could be considered the best ballads that the record has to offer. The band utilizes this type of progression throughout
Invented, yielding slow-developing but throughly rewarding results.
Of course, not every moment on
Invented is a diamond waiting to be uncovered. Some of the songs, despite their excellent production, simply aren’t memorable enough to stand on the same level as the rest of the album. “Higher Devotion”, for instance, features an intriguing pre-chorus, but it never seems to actually go anywhere. “Stop” drags on in a similar way, with a great deal of emphasis on Jim Adkins’ vocals but not much else. Songs like these tend to make portions of the album drag on a little, but catchy and up-front numbers like “My Best Theory” and “Coffee and Cigarettes” help to keep
Invented from becoming a snooze fest during those times. As a whole, one must approach this album with patience and allow it to reveal its concealed moments of excellence to you gradually, over the course of time and with repeated listens.
On
Invented, Jimmy Eat World is playing their own version of “hard to get.” They know as well as anyone that they could have hauled their asses into the studio, recorded ten catchy numbers, and called it an album. Instead, they have crafted something that is not immediate, but rather intriguing beyond the music’s polished surface. It won’t hit home as hard as
Futures, and it doesn’t have the infectiousness of
Bleed American or even
Chase this Light, for that matter. Almost nothing about
Invented is immediately rewarding, but with patience you will find that the album is sincere, reflective, and every bit as emotionally expressive as the band’s past endeavors.
Invented is, for all intents and purposes, the true definition of a
grower.
