Every Jimmy Eat World Album: Ranked From Worst To Best

It's possible Jimmy Eat World will never write another song with the burning intensity and immediacy of "Call It In the Air" or the pulsing melancholy of "Rockstar". But that's okay, because the band has gotten incrementally better at crafting albums as a whole since they released Static Prevails in 1996.

Those two songs, by the way, are the only ones that might earn the "classic" label on this album. While there are some other very decent tracks here - "Seventeen" and "Claire", to name a couple - nothing else stands up and demands your attention like the best J.E.W. tunes.

Maybe the pressures - and restrictions - of recording with a major label led to this rather disjointed effort, which suffers a bit from overproduction in parts and an uneasy lack of direction in others.

The inconsistency isn't helped by the fact that Jim Adkins and Tom Linton split lead vocal duties, with Adkins singing the moodier tracks and Linton taking over for the more aggressive tunes.

To be fair, there are bits of absolute brilliance scattered throughout Static Prevails, but they're simply too few and far between to take the album to that next level.