Originally Posted by Mankycaaant

I've often contemplated this one.

I think both set out to achieve different things.

Clarity has the feeling of wide eyed optimistic youngsters who are enamored by life, it's possibilities and their lives ahead of them.
It's very dreamy and weaves in equal measurements of naivety and aspects of stargazing. Songs like Just Watch the Fireworks and Believe in What You Want just capture the beauty of the world and cleverly intertwine them with melancholy lyrics.

The musicianship in Clarity is often lauded as being extremely well constructed and harmonized, even down to the vocals if one were to look at Goodbye Sky Harbour.
It's less showy and crowd oriented than Bleed American and the focus is on the record itself as to singalong choruses and extroversion.
It's a very intimate introverted journey of self discovery. I imagine it would be the soundtrack to packing up all your belongings and skipping town with a girl you've loved for a week.

Bleed American, I wouldn't call so much emo as an important pop rock album. It's quite a departure from Clarity in that it's not a dreamy record wrapped up in the moment and spontaneous nature of how life could be, and rather a well thought out display of what life is.
There's a lot of relatable lyrics and themes in Bleed American. It's an album that's not up on a cloud like Clarity and has its feet set firmly in reality with songs like Get it Faster realizing not everything in life is as nice as it first seemed and rather point to negative aspects of life.

As I mentioned, Bleed American is more of a pop rock record. Big outlandish singalong choruses, heavier, less complicated musicianship. It feels less like a personal journey of discovery and more the forced anthem of your late teens/early twenties.
It's an album aimed at hitting a bigger audience and a larger demographic. It does that. It's more accessible than Clarity and possess more memorable individual songs.

Personally, I prefer Clarity. It's a unique voyage into the rest of life, stuffed with a plethora of wishful thinking and hope. It's more intimate, more personal. The music's frankly better and as an album it's more cohesive and better put together. Every nuance of every sound means something and is beautifully arranged.
Don't get me wrong, Bleed American is a wonderful album too, but Clarity represents Jimmy Eat World at their peak, when they were still on their own roads of self discovery and represents them at their best musically and probably the time of their lives when they were experiencing their best times.