Jimmy Eat World - Futures (Review: Dan)

I like Jimmy Eat World. I love the the album Chase This Light, and I find Adkins' vocals brilliant. And normally, a good vocalist is enough for me. And for some reason, I've never gotten round to listening to Futures, despite the fact that I love almost everything I have heard from the band, and they were one of my favourite live acts of 2008.

So I was actually quite looking forward to hearing this. But it is with massive regret that I report; I did not enjoy the album. That's not to say there weren't any good songs on it though, as there some that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Futures and Just Tonight... were not enjoyed at all, they did nothing to excite me and I couldn't find any enjoyment from them. However, I thought that the track Work was magnificent, and I began to think the album would start to improve. It turns out I was wrong, and, though it was a huge improvement on tracks 1 and 2, Kill was already a significant drop below the standard set by Work. Don't read too much into that though, I did enjoy the song. I think things picked up again with World You Love, though, which was a fairly decent track.

The song Pain is very good. This was the only song I knew before listening to the album, and it is undoubtedly one of the best. But it just doesn't suit the rest of the record. It sounds like it doesn't belong on Futures. I can't really justify this, but when I was listening to it, it just felt so out of place.
From then on I think the album got worse and worse, until the song 23 finally gave it a little bit of strength at the end.

I was really disappointed that I didn't enjoy this album; I think there is a lot of filler there, and hardly any strong tracks. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh; I think my hopes were probably just too high for Futures.

Settling on a score for the album, though, has possibly been harder than listening to it. It was let down by so many weak tracks, and I wanted to give it somewhere between 1.5 and 2...However, with tracks like Work, Kill (which grew on me with each listen) and 23, it seems rude to give it such a low score. So, thanks to some of it's better tracks I'm going to give it a (perhaps generous) 2.5 stars.

Highlight Tracks:
[3]Work
[4]Kill
[5]World You Love
[6]Pain
[11]23