Jars of Clay - The Eleventh Hour

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Music reviews of The Eleventh Hour

Music Review: Compelling and Challenging, With Nearly Insignificant Flaws
Rating: 5 Stars

The opening track, "Disappear," compares human beings to performers on a stage (a nice throwback to a similar analogy in "Boy on a String," a song from the band's debut album). As performers, we are being watched by an admirer whose attention is both scary and unwanted-God. "I'm so near/Invading every place you go to disappear," declares the omniscient admirer, and how many of us like to think of God wanting to "walk into [our] skin[s]/swim through [our] veins/see it from [our] eyes"? This song throws us headlong into the band members' pervasive Calvinism: We as human beings are so steeped in our sin that all we try to do when we encounter God is run from Him; there is no reaching out to God on our part. The song concludes with God's ultimate intentions: "I want to get inside the you you're hiding from."

"Something Beautiful," the followup track, is the first of this album's many "talk back" tracks. Having heard God's declarations of love, it's our turn to respond in all our fearfulness. "If you put your arms around me, would it change the way I feel," we ask plaintively as we sit in our prison cell, enslaved to sin. This imagery of being locked in chains is a favorite one of Haseltine's; see also "Portrait of an Apology" (from Much Afraid) and "Grace" (from If I Left the Zoo). Once again, we are shown to be utterly helpless; we have no good in ourselves, and we need to ask God to "cover [us]" with the goodness that only Christ has.

These two songs by and large set the pattern for the rest of the album, as we are exposed to some incredibly personal conversations. God/Christ returns again as the speaker in "Scarlet," but the rest of the songs consist of our words to either God ("I Need You," "Silence," "The Eleventh Hour," "These Ordinary Days," "The Edge of Water") or other human beings ("Revolution," "Fly," "Whatever She Wants"). In these songs, we get the sense of a wide variety of human longings. A number of these songs "talk back" to each other just as "Disappear" and "Something Beautiful" do.

And if we cannot escape the human longings on this album, we also cannot escape the band members' Calvinist worldview. (Three years ago, Christianity Today dubbed Jars of Clay "a band Luther and Calvin would love.") In "Scarlet," we are Rapunzel and Christ is our lover ("So let down your hair/Let our kiss make fools of them all"), and once again we do nothing in this relationship-not even our sins will keep us from him. "And this old scarlet letter won't keep me from holding you/And there is nothing you can do/Nothing you do," the speaker informs us, showing again (from a Calvinist perspective) our total inability to resist God/Christ. In "I Need You," the speaker finds out that God is both "the shelter from the rain/And the rain to wash me away" and is, consequently, inescapable. We still hide in shadows from God and live in doubt while perhaps maintaining a flicker of hope (as in "The Edge of Water"), and our love for God is weak, like a "sky faded blue" ("These Ordinary Days"); it's His love that sustains us.

If all of this sounds offputting, it shouldn't. The sentiments in the songs, while mostly in context involving a relationship between God and human beings, can apply to other relationships. For this reason, despite all of its theology and introspection, the album is very accessible to mainstream listeners as well as contemporary Christian ones, and it deserves wide success. (Given both their talent and their ability to speak to both people of faith and those without faith, Jars of Clay really should have mainstream radio and record company backing.)

Lyrically, this album contains Haseltine's best work to date, with mostly poetic verses that capture moods and feelings quite well. (Still, that "And if you know the beat/Grab a hammer, bang a gong" lyric is cringe-inducing, as is Haseltine's unfortunate tendency to switch verb tenses-sometimes even in the middle of the same sentence.) Musically, this album seems to be the least creative of any of the bands' previous albums, as several songs sound fairly alike. It is most similar musically to If I Left the Zoo, but without that album's considerable variety. Still, this album is no slouch in the musical department: Its mixture of rock, folk, and country sounds seems simultaneously both cutting edge and a welcome throwback to earlier rock/folk/country sounds such as those made by America back in the '70s.

So while this album does have its flaws, it's also one that tends to grow on you the longer than you listen to it, and the more you see its strengths, the more its flaws seem insignificant. Challenging on both a lyrical and a musical level, it is, as much as its predecessors, an album which explores the limit of and even stretches the boundaries of contemporary Christian music. For the fourth time in as many albums, Jars of Clay has reinvented itself, creating a collection that is unlike any of its previous efforts and once again proving that it is one of the most interesting bands around anywhere.

Description of The Eleventh Hour

Christian & Gospel CDs

• Music > Styles
• Pop
• Rock