Emo didn't have the classic rock pretensions of grunge and alt-rock, nor was it anywhere near as crisp and accessible as pop-punk, which was then growing exponentially more popular. Emo, instead, was rock music in a confused state, made by and for confused people. I hated emo in high school—Saves the Day, Dashboard Confessional, all the sad boys with guitars getting airtime on MTV2. Any band that wielded emotions I felt acutely every day made me feel like a vampire exposed to daylight. Resentment, alienation, unrequited love—these already made up the emotional landscape of one's teenage years, high school hallways without end. There was something mortifying about listening to music that echoed that experience so directly back at me. I preferred indie rock bands whose lyrics were opaque enough to disintegrate in your grasp. This, it seemed to me, was fundamentally more adult and dignified, as if abstracting your angst instead of contending with it was obviously the more mature thing to do. On first contact, Jimmy Eat World can sound too simplistic and straightforward, all text and no subtext, all dumb feeling with no mediated surface, which made liking them automatically embarrassing yet difficult to resist. When I saw a copy of Clarity in my high school library, though, something about the cover—four cryptic photographs taken from a grid of sixteen, the rest of which revealed themselves as you unfolded the booklet—made the band feel complicated all of a sudden, as if these were shadow realms that loomed beyond their popular hits. Some of the images were captured at such a microscopic level of detail it's hard to grasp the whole they must have been cropped from: pinholes of light playing on a watery surface; a flashlight illuminating what looks like a cave interior; the net of a screen door, possibly after rain, making the world beyond it look like wet squares of paint. The photos so often resist interpretation, it's like they've captured something in the midst of being remembered, a lost detail of someone's life gradually coming back into focus. Instead of being greeted with the loud rasp of a guitar, Clarity begins with an organ drone slowly filling the room with its single note. (According to Adkins, this was the band's "punk rock" way of opening the album, punk in this instance being less about loud music than a devotion to the unexpected.) A snare drum and a ride cymbal sway evenly out of the mists of the drone.