I was a much bigger emo fan in high school than I am today. My friends and I not only taught each other about emo bands we might not have heard about, and frequented every emo concert in the area, but actually bragged to each other about how much our favorite emo albums made us cry. Hell, I exaggerated about emo’s ability to make me cry because I wasn’t much of a crier at the time. That’s how emo we wanted to be. And in those high school days, I probably could have better appreciated something like Boat Race Weekend’s Throw Your Head to the World!

But at 32, all I can hear in this album are all the clichés and excesses that are dragging the genre down. There’s the band name that’s essentially a bunch of unrelated nouns shoved together, the simplistically swirling guitars that sound like early Appleseed Cast being played by someone who just learned how to play the instrument, the songs that are each consistently at least a minute longer than they need to be, and the lead singer’s voice that’s trying so hard to sound emotionally wrought that it comes off sounding like parody.

Maybe it’s just that I’m getting too old, and perhaps that’s why the new Jimmy Eat World just isn’t doing it for me either, but from where I’m sitting in life right now, Throw Your Head to the World! is a near perfect chronicle of everything that’s gone wrong with emo.