A bunch of them are really close for me but I’m not putting Damage above BA, Futures, CTL, Invented, or IB on any day
Need more love for Bleed American the album Straight up hits and some underrated classics like If You Don’t, Don't Cautioners is some righteous shit
For whatever reason I didn't click with Invented upon its release but now it's one of my favorites of theirs.
Cautioners is criminally underrated. It's the only song from Bleed American with less than a million plays on Spotify. At least on the deluxe edition.
Curious, how do you check plays for individual songs on Spotify? I’ve been wanting to do that forever.
Listened to Invented last night and while there are some great deep cuts like title track, Cut, Coffee and Cigarettes, Mixtape, Littlething... the album feels like a mess at times. Action Needs an Audience is a throwaway and the stretch of My Best Theory-Evidence-Higher Devotion is straight up annoying to my ears. Two tracks trying to cash in on the whole Muse/dance rock vibe sandwiching the most JEW by numbers rock song they’ve ever written in Evidence.
I don't care for "Higher Devotion" or "Action Needs An Audience" but I absolutely love me some non-demo "Anais".
Futures is and probably always will be my favorite, but Chase This Light has been gaining on it over the years and is honestly just a scrape below it as my #2 at this point.
Invented the song and littlethings are my jaaams. Ugh the part of invented when it ramps up and is like ITS A CINEMATIC END my soul just leaves my body
For me, the songs that I do love on Invented are some of my absolute favorite JEW songs, but the album gets derailed from that masterpiece status that some of their other records achieve by a few duds. The first two songs are great, “Evidence” is phenomenal, “Higher Devotion” is a turd, but then the album goes on an absolutely stellar 5 song stretch from “Movielike” to “Cut”. Those handful of songs where a lot of albums start to lag a little bit is where Invented really shines. I don’t care for “Action Needs An Audience” but then “Invented” the song is absolutely incredible. I have always been personally turned off by the lyrics to “Mixtape” even though I think the music is alright. I’m not sure why… Also, like I mentioned before, the non-demo version of “Anais” that Japan and the UK got is fantastic. So I love 9 out of 12 tracks, plus there is a great bonus track. For a lot of other bands there’s a strong chance this would be my favorite album by them or the one I consider their best work. Only JEW are musical gods who consistently put out masterpieces every couple years for like 20 years now.
I realized today that while JEW is one of my all time favorite bands, I don’t know a lot about them as people. I don’t obsess over every detail like I do with blink. I hardly know names of songs or which album certain songs are on but I know all the words to all the songs. I can shuffle their catalogue and be completely happy. Everything is great.