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Jimmy Eat World: Easy To Digest Fast Food Music

No greatness was basked in at this gig, but the audience came away hot and happy.
01 juni 2002, Brixton Academy, London (UK)

Tekst: Alexa Williamson

Publicatiedatum: 11 juni 2002

No doubt, Jimmy Eat World were the big hitters on the Mesa, Arizona rock scene when they formed in '94. However, outside their hometown they've never been able to get out of the shadow of bigger bands who deliver their power-punk-laced-with-metal with more grunt and less grace.

Signing them in '96, Capitol, intentionally or not, made them rivals to Green Day and Blink 182, who also signed to majors around the same time. Having lost the competition to be larger than life, their fate since then has been to be compared to the others for all eternity.

The foursome returned to the Brixton Academy to promote their latest single Sweeteners, which was out on 3 June and followed the 2001 release of their third album Bleed American.

Opening with new, high-energy punk tracks A Praise Chorus and Bleed American, they demonstrated why it is fair to call them Green Day-wannabes. However, the catchy, guitar-driven jingles were well-delivered, and singer Jim Adkins' voice sounded good even when screaming.

The group's metal and heavy rock sides were revealed as they played Your New Aesthetic and Rockstar, which sounded like watered-down Pearl Jam with Iron Maiden guitar interludes. Nonetheless, their t-shirt- and baggy jeans-wearing adolescent and pre-adolescent audience drank it down (since they couldn't order anything from the bar).

However, the songs that got the mosh pits started and the nine-year-old boys bragging to their moms after the gig, were the simplistic, yet head-bangable, five-minute tunes about teens with screwed-up lives. The repetitive chords and choruses of Lucky Denver and Get It Faster were the stimulants of the masses.

Their 75-minute set, which finished with an encore that included their most popular song The Middle, made anyone that was able to buy booze and smokes at the end of the '90s realise that Jimmy Eat World's strength isn't in their originality as songwriters and musicians, but in their ability to produce very consumable, juiced-up products — which are exactly what the under-18, alt-pop market gets high on.

No greatness was basked in at this gig, but the audience came away hot and happy, as they met their parents who were waiting anxiously for them outside the venue.

http://www.kindamuzik.net/live/jimmy-eat-world/jimmy-eat-world-easy-to-digest-fast-food-music/1613/
Meer Jimmy Eat World op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/jimmy-eat-world