Oooh. Yeah..

I was looking into buying Static Prevails on vinyl on their website and had been checking back every day for a while when the front page of their website was dominated by a fifteen second clip of a car driving down a road with the song "Get Right" playing in the background.

Jimmy Eat World is one of my favorite bands, period. But from the fifteen second clip, I knew that it felt unnatural. Get Right is slow and loud, but the writing isn't very clever, and none of the sounds feel very powerful in general. It sounds like something monstrous is lurking beneath the surface. Unfortunately, I feel that the something monstrous never presented itself.

That's Integrity Blues in a nutshell for me. It feels like it could have been a meditative epic. But it feels incomplete, like the high production value is meant to make up for the lack of theatricality. People are constantly saying that Integrity Blues is JEWs best album since Bleed American. I have a few contentions there. The biggest being that I think every single album that precedes Integrity Blues is superior.

Bleed American was far more cohesive than anything to come afterward. But Clarity and Futures are both far more thoughtful. Static Prevails has a raw edge that the band has never recaptured. Invented was more creative. Damaged was more mature without being a bore. The only album that I feel has the same overall creative direction was Chase This Light. Then you have Integrity Blues. I'm not saying Integrity Blues is objectively bad, but it does not live up to the grandeur I've associated with the rest of their discography.