Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

American's title track, bound to blow up a radio near you, is the best Nirvana-like tune since Kurt Cobain left this earth. Another churning cut, "Sweetness," runs a close second. Both conjure that shock of near-bubblegum catchiness, airtight ensemble attack and bittersweet mingling of anguish and uplifting melody that many bands fake but few can pull off. Better news is that the album boasts nine other tracks that don't sound anything like these two but are every bit as concisely designed and ardently delivered.

Jimmy Eat World come out of a scene that's been around for decades but is just now bubbling onto rock radio: emo. Emo, a.k.a. emo-core, has been around since the mid-Eighties, when introspective hardcore bands struggled to reverse punk's shrinking stylistic definitions. Instead of revolution and anarchy, emo bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate and the Promise Ring focus on personal turmoil, replacing bellows and bulldozing power chords with boyish yelps and intricate guitar arpeggios to reflect conflicted internal truths. Emo employs alternative rock's obligatory heavy guitars only in moments of sheer catharsis - a strategy that makes even more sense in 2001, a year when neometal bands wear their inner turmoil on their T-shirts. Emo remains a hazy category; Weezer have been recently lumped in with the sound, much to the chagrin of mainstream-wary scenesters. Similarly, any emo kid will tell you that Jimmy Eat World aren't emo, if only because Bleed American is their third major-label album.

But Bleed American sports the tender turbulence that insular emo kids have been enjoying in private for years, presented in a sure-shot package ready for Creed and Blink buyers, as well as anyone old or savvy enough to know New Wave's hooky delights. "All I need is just to hear a song I know," Jim Adkins pleads in "A Praise Chorus" before letting loose a string of lyric snippets quoting Tommy James, Madness, Motley Crue and more while channeling the Romantics on a collision course with the Ramones. Elsewhere, the band suggests early U2 on the slow-building balladry of "Your House," "Hear You Me" and "My Sundown"; the mechanical glow of "Cautioners" recalls the Cars; you can hear Cheap Trick in the nasal, high-pitched catchiness of