THE STONES + JIMMY EAT WORLD

GROWING STRAINS

The Rolling Stones turn 50 and Jimmy Eat World reach for adulthood

by Matt Ashare |  
Published June 12, 2013

As the Rolling Stones embark on what's being accurately billed as their "50 & Counting" tour, it may be worth taking a metaphorical step back, away from the media hype, to consider how it is, in a year that will see both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards celebrate their 70th birthdays, that they've been able to remain a viable rock vehicle for a full half century. Any number of potentially relevant factors have been mentioned from time to time, including Mick's pathological passion for the spotlight, Keith's supernatural embodiment of the renegade rock and roll spirit, and, I suppose, the inherent momentum the band have accrued over time by simply refusing to call it quits. Nevertheless, the Stones haven't recorded a compelling new album in quite a while. "Some Girls," released over thirty years ago, is probably the last Stones studio outing that wasn't merely passable, that counted as something approaching approaching a coherent artistic statement. Even ardent fans of the band tend to admit that the eight albums since (2005's forgettable "A Bigger Bang" is the most recent) were essentially excuses to reconvene for the purposes of mounting yet another multi-million-dollar world tour.
    Mercifully. the Stones didn't find it necessary to go through the motions of writing and recording another batch of tunes this time around, which, if nothing else, spares those of us who count ourselves as fans from the wasted effort of rooting around for something of value where there are only scraps. Perhaps Mick and Keith realized that not going through the pointless motions in a recording studio might contribute to the band's longevity or, at least, help maintain a level of relative congeniality in what has been revealed to be a rather volatile creative partnership. In any case, the Stones are indeed back, and people are paying a pretty price to catch what may very well amount to their final tour.
    One way to account for the Stones soldiering on well past what might be considered a respectable retirement age in the realm of rock and roll, is that at heart they remain dedicated to the blues and to r&b, two genres that haven't traditionally had much of an age ceiling. And, in the dozen or so times I've seen them over the years, I've been struck by the malleability of so much of their better known hit — their classics. Jagger and Richards have never been particularly keen on confessional songwriting: their best tracks are all about the thrill of the riff, and their lyrics typically deal in situations, observations, and narratives that aren't specific to youth. "Sympathy For the Devil," "Brown Sugar," "Midnight Rambler," and "Honky Tonk Women," worked just as well for the band in their fifties and sixties as they did when they were first written. Even songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,"
"Mother's Little Helper," and "Paint It Black," may have been born of a kind of youthful insolence, but they don't demand to be sung from the perspective of a twenty-something. If anything, the themes of drowning in advertising, relieving daily tedium with prescription meds, are as consonant today as they were four decades ago, in large part because they aren't about wearing one's heart on one's sleeve.
    The Mesa, Arizona emo-pop band Jimmy Eat World are no Rolling Stones. That much goes without saying. But, I couldn't help thinking about the Stones when a proactive publicist shot me a link to a stream of the band's new album, "Damage," several weeks before its release on Tuesday. Actually, my first thought was something along the lines of, Really? Jimmy Eat World, a foursome who struct a resonant, youthful, post-Nirvana alt-rock chord when they emerged in the mid-’90s proudly sporting one big, gushing heart on their torn collective sleeve, and who I quite liked at the time, are still at it eight albums later? My second thought centered around just what a band who specialized in mining the treacherous psychic terrain of post-teenage stress disorder (symptoms include existential ennui, romantic confusion, irrational insecurity, and a pronounced tendency to overshare in a hopeful way) might be up to at this stage in their career. Probably not still aching to be satisfied and examining the fresh scabs of yet another dysfunctional relationship as if it were a mortal wound.
    Well, yes and no. As the mostly black-and-white Vevo video for the album's de-facto first single, the pensively anthemic "I Will Steal You Back" (or as one Internet poster joked, "I Will Steal Your Bike"), quickly reveals, handsomely stoic singer Jim Adkins isn't trying to hide the fact that he's now 37 and, apparently, married — there are at least three closeups of his ringed finger. Buoyed by swells of churning melodic guitar and a steadfast backbeat, Adkins throws himself into roiling seas of mixed emotions. "Here we go, here we go, we'll take on so much pain," he earnestly intones, "To feel secure, not feel anything/I only pick a fight I know I'm sure to lose/So how can I not hold my hope for you?"
    His subject here, and on most of "Damage," is how the day-to-day wear and tear on a relationship can add up to a mountain of trouble or, at least, an overwhelming sense of unease. As he observes in "I Will Steal You Back," "It's funny how the smallest lie, might live a million times." In a sense, it's a more nuanced and reflective take on the same romantic issues Adkins was wrestling with twenty years ago, namely that varying degrees of reality never seem to match up to the storybook notions of how it's all supposed to be. And, I suppose, that's a big part of why I lost track of Jimmy Eat World somewhere around 1999. Early on, they impressed me as a very tidy example of what most people mean when they invoke the term "emo," smart, capable, polite dudes with punk-rock leanings and the will to be super sensitive. Think of a singer/songwriter with an acoustic guitar bearing his soul, put a fully plugged-in band and a muscular drummer behind him and, viola, you've got the makings of emo. (It's no accident that one of the seminal emocore albums of the early 90s, the debut by the Seattle band Sunny Day Real Estate, was titled "Diary.")
    Jimmy Eat World now have an acoustic guitar, which they deploy several times on "Damage," notably on the title track, which finds a melancholy Adkins admitting, "I hate the way I feel, but I don't think I can change/I just breathe through each day." It's a just-short-of-break-up song, filled with the sort of fearful thoughts you'd best think twice about before voicing to a partner, questions like "Are we only damaging the little we have left?/Are we too damaged now to possibly connect, honestly connect?" Of course, giving voice to such disquieting thoughts is an avocation for Adkins, and something he very nearly revels in. Having worked through post-teenage stress disorder, he and his crew appear to be eying early-onset midlife crisis. It may not be poetic or even particularly clever, but it is affecting. And, though it can seem a bit fawning at times, Jimmy Eat World succeed at striking the kind of emotional chord that the Rolling Stones have rarely hit, in part because they've never really aimed for that sort of thing.