Clarity was, when released in 1999, a commercial failure. Despite some radio play and even the placement of lead single “Lucky Denver Mint” in a Drew Barrymore movie, it sold so poorly that Jimmy Eat World dropped from Capitol Records. But in the years that have passed Clarity’s influence and reputation have grown, much like its contemporary, Weezer’s Pinkerton.

But Clarity is a rather different affair in tone, a grandiose work that leaves 90’s whisper-to-a-scream dynamics behind in favor of slow, soaring swells, chimes, strings, and meditative rhythm, and closer sonically to bands like Christie Front Drive and Bedhead (both of which frontman Jim Adkins has claimed as major influences) than to the grunge and alt-rock of post-Nirvana pop radio. Crossing the demure fuzziness of a Rainer Maria with the pop majesty and listing strings of the mournfully-mostly-forgotten Verbow, it floats in a sort of sonic timelessness, hard to pin to a particular era with a strange ethereality that keeps it from feeling dated. Emotionally, it finds its heart in the quieter thoughts — melancholy, regret, uneasiness, hope and promise: a work of startling maturity for a genre— call it “emo” if you must— typically pegged as teen-centric and emotionally underdeveloped. Its lyrics are frequently hyperspecific but without context, more of a color pallete than a painting, a series of entryways to emotional resonance for the listener to latch on to and then feel his or her own way through.

Opener “Table For Glasses,” with its chiming guitar and deliberate, lugubrious pace, sets the tone.  Fighting its own urge to accelerate, pretty but tense, it eventually swells upward instead of outward, in a flowering of strings and vocal harmonies, eventually compressing in on itself before giving way to the tumbling electronic drums and distinctive hi-hat riff that forms the backbone of “Lucky Denver Mint,” which finds the narrator wishing on a penny for someone’s return while cursing their leaving in the same breath: the intersection of love, longing, and disappointment.  

“Your New Aesthetic,” a rallying cry against the homogenization of commercial radio, is perhaps the most specific lyrically of all the songs on Clarity, Adkins’s frustrations with band, label and career laid bare in a churn of fuzzy guitar that recalls the band’s previous release, Static Prevails.  The following track, “Believe In What You Want,” flips the camera, reading as a challenge from the band to themselves to stay true in the face of the pressures to take the easy road to success. The track succeeds in the grandest way musically, full of raging guitars and secondary vocals pressed deep into the background, almost a metaphoric burial of the then-standard rock tropes behind gorgeous vocal harmonies, ultimately sliding into the ringing chimes which open “On A Sunday.”

“Crush,” a simple ode to a goodbye in the snow, captures the unbridled exuberance of new lust as perfectly as any song may ever have, with galloping drums and an explosive ascending guitar riff that rears its head in the chorus and recalls the squeal of fellow second-wavers Mineral before dissolving into the hypnotic electronics of “12.23.95,” moving from lust to longing to the slow unravelling of “Ten,” breaking down to a swirl of plinking piano before snuffing out.

The emotional heart of the album,”Just Watch The Fireworks” is hardly a song in structure at all— rather it’s a swirling soar of continual chorus, “I promised I’d see it again // I promised I’d see it with you now” over and over, promises made that might never be fulfilled, like a mantra repeated, the sound of a man trying to convince himself, as though the incantation might in itself be enough to bring about its resolution, but instead finding just the distance of “For Me This Is Heaven”.

“Blister,” the only song on Clarity featuring lead vocals from guitarist Tom Linton, stares into the dark pit that might be the end of love and might be small-town blues, and is probably a little of both, bursting at the seams with the need for desperate escape.  It all comes together on the title track, churning baseline and martial drums, finding resolution in letting go: “Wait for something better // maybe that doesn’t mean us’”.  

But it is album closer “Goodbye Sky Harbor” that has become Clarity’s signature track.  Borrowing from A Prayer For Owen Meany by way of “Leaving On A Jet Plane” as the narrator’s plane sails off and away, leaving but not forgetting: “Here I am above palm trees so straight and tall // you are smaller, getting smaller /. but I still see you…” Thusly as well the song. Its guitar riff repeat over and over, slowly transforming as snippets of vocal harmony are layered in and out, electronic drums metamorphosing through a grand sixteen minutes of gorgeous post-rock as beautiful as anything by Explosions In The Sky. It’s a gesture that’s been imitated often since, sometimes to good effect (see “A” from Cartel’s Chroma), sometimes to ill. It’s bold, different, adventurous. It’s the sound of a narrator, a band, and a genre, achieving clarity.

*This review was composed by Jesse Richman