Fourth album, second single, hold tight.
This record was released as a commercial single in the UK in February this year. It made the top 30 sales, anchored the Fab 50 sales and airplay chart for a week, then fell away. Not a bad performance by a group that had had almost no attention until then.
Start off with a chugging, plucked guitar riff, then one drum beat, and go full blast into the vocals. These are reassuring words. These are positive words.
Then the US finally caught up with the genius that this track (and indeed, the band) represents, sent it to #1 Modern Rock, then into the top 10 of the Hot 100. At the time of writing, it stands at #8, closing in on some huge sellers.
Then comes a taster of the chorus, just enough to know that this is the ultimate feelgood upbeat track yet nowhere near enough to satisfy.
The video shows a fully-dressed Joe Sensitive enter a frat party where everyone is wearing white underwear. He starts to take off his clothes, figures that Jo Sensitive is also taking off her clothes in the wardrobe next door, and the two decide to walk out hand-in-hand and not bowing to the expectations of everyone else.
Through another verse to the stuttering chorus in full, and an amazingly long, complex guitar riff.
The Phoenix-based band have worked hard. They've just finished a sell-out tour of the UK (for which I couldn't get tickets) and gigged their way to success.
Suitably refreshed, it's a quieter third verse leading to - yes - that chorus again.
Unfairly grouped with the lumpen Hundred Reasons as the commercial face of the "emo scene," the Jimmys have a way of reaching the centre of the argument straight away without any of the poncing about typical of many nu-metallers.
And then, just 2:44 after we began, it's all over.
Q magazine described the album as the sort of thing sensitive metal fans would make out to. That's not entirely an unreasonable description, not that I've any experience in that area at all. No ma'am.
The album, Bleed American
, was out last summer, withdrawn, and reissued as an eponymous album.
As ever, thanks are forwarded.