Description
The Eleventh Hour is the fourth studio album by the American alternative pop band Jars of Clay, released on Essential Records in March 2002, a division of Brentwood Music, distributed by Provident Music Distribution. The album was recorded at Sputnik Sound and Playground Recording Studios in Nashville, Tennessee; with then band producing.
Releasing a watershed project can be a mixed blessing of sorts. While it usually carves out a fairly prominent position on the musical map for the group or artist in question, it oftentimes becomes an impossibly high standard against which the sole success or failure of successive projects is determined. At the time of its 1995 release, the Jars of Clay album was nearly universally praised in musical circles, notching record-breaking sales figures and garnering unprecedented rotation on mainstream pop and modern rock radio. And, perhaps, rightly so given the fact that the group’s particular blend of influences, which vocalist Dan Haseltine at the time described as an amalgamation of Sarah McLachlan, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and Janet Jackson, was as unwaveringly catchy as it was unique.
While the follow-up albums, Much Afraid and If I Left the Zoo, were slightly darker in their approach and featured more subdued instrumental textures, The Eleventh Hour shows a renewed attention to both melodic and rhythmic content. Similarly, while the greater parts of the second and third projects focused on relationships and their associated struggles, the new record seems to be constructed more around rallying cries to action. The dynamic lead-off track, «Disappear», (I’d really love to climb into your soul/ Walk into your skin/ Swim through your veins) is a compelling plea for revelation from a loved one. The likewise driving «»Revolution», with its zealous exhortation to “bang a gong,” mirrors both the spirit and grit of the T-Rex work whose namesake it quotes. And the title track (Rescue me from hanging on this line/ Let the eleventh hour quickly pass me by) carries with it the palpable urgency of one’s waning days.
As solid as its faster entries are, Hour’s slower songs are perhaps even more imposing. The gripping «Scarlet» paints its intriguing, and slightly unsettling, treatise on forgiveness with dark and long-lasting strokes. «These Ordinary Days» (Let me lay down in this field/ And stare up at the sky/ Hope the days and clouds/ Turn into something as they pass us by) manages to pull profundity from the commonplace. And «Ordinary Days» is both aching and acute; its simple starkness positioning it alongside the group’s most beautiful ballads. While the slower entries on Zoo and Much Afraid sometimes seemed calculated or forced, those of Eleventh Hour seem less the product of observation or reflection and more the natural by-product of passion and longing, arriving at their simple beauty almost, it would seem, effortlessly.
While the actual instrumental construction of Hour is just different enough from the first release to quell rumors of a strict return to the group’s earliest musical form, the album nonetheless features a magnificently sublime sense of both beauty and poignancy that tops any of its predecessors, including the debut. In the seven years since the release of the first album, the proliferation of like-minded artists has arguably made follow-up efforts by the band appear somewhat less distinctive than they actually were. With The Eleventh Hour, however, the members of the Illinois foursome once again put some distance between themselves and the masses at large, offering up solid proof that they possess a depth and talent that few groups, new or otherwise, are consistently able to replicate. [Bert Gangl, The Phantom Tollbooth, 4/3/2002]
> Apple Music (https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-eleventh-hour/256245464)
CD tracklist:
01. Disappear – 3:56
02. Something Beautiful – 3:46
03. Revolution – 3:42
04. Fly – 3:20
05. I Need You – 3:40
06. Silence – 5:17
07. Scarlet – 3:32
08. Whatever She Wants – 3:43
09. The Eleventh Hour – 4:27
10. These Ordinary Days – 3:04
11. The Edge Of Water – 3:54
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