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“CHASE THIS LIGHT”

WHAT DAVE HERRERA THINKS: When I got my hands on “Chase This Light,” Jimmy Eat World’s sixth album, I was excited to revisit the group I knew a few years ago, part sensitive power-pop and part aggressive punk.

I must have missed something in the interim.

The band has stripped most of those old qualities and left itself with bland power-pop.

Singer Jim Adkins’s voice has moved itself up a few registers. No more raw force, like on “Bleed American,” and no more reserved emotion like what filled their third album “Clarity.”

His most memorable moment, in fact, comes when there aren’t any words: The “Oh oh oh”s in the chorus to “Electable (Give It Up),” a standard anti-authority number with a Green Day feel.

Most of the lyrics also hit on other standards: love won and lost, independence, running away from cities, and so on.

On “Big Casino” he laments: “There’s lots of smart ideas in books I never read/when the girls come talk to me I wish to hell I had.”

Later, on “Firefight”: “For you and me there’s nowhere left to hide/’Cept you and me there’s no one else alive.”

Behind Adkins, the band occasionally offers a few catch moments.

Most of these come on pleasant vocal harmonies, like “Firefight” or “Let It Happen,” with help from Amy Ross of the band Nowhere Man and a Whiskey Girl.

But then there are jaw-dropping flops like “Here It Goes” and the title track, polished to a “High School Musical”-esque shine.

Perhaps I’m just not willing to go in the direction the band wants, and that’s fine. But the band used to be too good for me to let that happen quietly.