Chase This Light by Jimmy Eat World (Inter­scope) is the band’s sixth stu­dio project released on Octo­ber 16, 2007. I should pref­ace this review by say­ing that I never (since “The Mid­dle” was a radio hit in early 2002) lis­tened to Jimmy Eat World before I came across this release pretty randomly.

The album begins with their first sup­port­ing sin­gle, “Big Casino” that offers a refresh­ing alt. rock hit only to be con­tin­ued by the very catchy yet poignant tune “Let It Hap­pen” with intro­spec­tive lines such as “col­li­sion is such an ugly sound.” The next track pro­vides the sec­ond sin­gle from the record enti­tled “Always Be.”

Next up is “Carry You,” a slightly more acoustic and mel­low track fol­lowed by the hard-hitting “Elec­table (Give It Up)” which makes up for the pre­vi­ous track’s lack of energy how­ever it can get a lit­tle repet­i­tive at times. “Gotta Be Somebody’s Blues” fol­lows with another laid-back feel… it hap­pens to be my least favorite track on the album. “Feel­ing Lucky” and “Here It Goes” both offer more energy addic­tive sounds fol­lowed by three addi­tional slightly more alter­na­tive tracks enti­tled ““Chase This Light,” “Fire­flight,” and “Dizzy”.

All the tracks on this release have solid yet catchy lyrics and great music. It must have been extremely dif­fi­cult to decide on sin­gles on this album as there were at least 5 tracks wor­thy of rock radio’s appetite. Over­all, there’s only one or two tracks at most that you would even think to skip over. Need­less to say, I was delight­fully sur­prised by this release. I would highly rec­om­mend this album.

“Say” by John Mayer is the com­mer­cial sin­gle released on Novem­ber 20, 2007 (Aware Records) in sup­port of and specif­i­cally writ­ten for the upcom­ing Rob Reiner film The Bucket List in the­aters every­where on Jan­u­ary 11^th.

I’m usu­ally not an advo­cate of music videos, how­ever, you can get the video free on iTunes. It’s actu­ally a very sim­plis­tic and over­all well done video incor­po­rat­ing scenes from the movie, of course. The song is even more pow­er­ful if you watch the trailer for the movie (see link above). Mayer recently posted on his blog about the song: “I don’t know how much harder it gets than to see a beau­ti­ful, bit­ter­sweet movie and then have to write a song that matches the tone.”