Sloth > Neglect

I swear I'm not avoiding your or ignoring you on purpose. Getting back into the swing of things from my vacation is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. Getting my vacation stories into a set of coherent thoughts is also taking longer. I go back and forth between doing it all in one post, or doing a week of posts to follow the week of vacation. I'm leaning towards the latter as then I can be creative. Perhaps I'll start on Saturday. I also have photos to share, but that would mean that I have to upload them and that requires actual effort. It doesn't help that I have a ton of game writing to do as well and including a Mr. Binky column for which I currently don't have an idea.

On that note, Mr. Binky has been reduced to a monthly schedule due to less than stellar traffic, so if you read it and you enjoy it, pass the links on to others, or at least travel around town and read the column from many different computers.

Before leaving for my vacation I ordered the deluxe, remastered version of Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American. Usually I'm not down with these types of reissues, but I absolutely love this album and the notion of an entire disc of live tracks and b-sides really appealed to me. It was delivered to me this past Saturday and did not disappoint.

First of all, they brought back the original title, which is a good thing. The album was released after 9-11 so they changed it from Bleed American to Jimmy Eat World. Given that the former is also a track on the record, and a damn good one at that, it makes sense that the original title be brought back. Plus, the band is a lot more popular now, so a self titled album isn't as necessary. The songs all sound great, as you'd expect and while I can't speak to the remasteredness of it all, I'm sure the engineers did a wonderful job.

This album holds a special place in my heart because it's the album that allowed me to discover the band, and I hold Jimmy Eat World as one of my absolute favorites. I tend to relate more to the songs on Futures but for balls to the wall, rocking out, it's hard to go wrong with Bleed American. Plus, these songs sound great live, so listening them brings me back to when I saw the band in Atlanta. The live tracks included as extras sound great, as do the b-sides, including their fantastic cover of Wham!'s "Last Christmas". Usually I can only listen to that song during the month of December due to our strict policy of Christmas music only at Christmas, however with this set, I can listen to it whenever I want to and Linda won't know. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Bottom line is that it's a fantastic reissue of a seminal album from one of the best bands working today. The extras are well worth it, so for 24 bucks, it's hard to go wrong. What a dizzy dance indeed.