Deep Elm in releasing slightly-better-than-average record shocker?! This is an odd one for me because usually everything I receive from Deep Elm is quality, yet Eleven Minutes Away ditch the label’s usual subtle and complex styles for a band that sounds like a more melodic Underoath. Now that wouldn’t be so bad if seven million other bands weren’t already doing the same thing. ‘Arson Followed Me Home’ isn’t a bad record per se, it just doesn’t offer anything new or interesting and I think I’m unlikely to be listening to this in six weeks time, let alone six months.
The Ontario mob switch from singing/screaming in the blink of an eye like many of their post-hardcore bretheren. They remind me in places of Silverstein – maybe it’s the Canadian connection, I’m not sure. Anyway, there’s a lot of metallic-riffing going on and there are even more melodies and nice vocal harmonies, but it’s all a little cliched. The screaming or quiet/loud parts are all in the right places and it’s very much a case of heard-it-all-before. It’s a pity really because the likes of ‘PS I Hate You’ and ‘This Is Only An Emergency‘ are quite catchy little numbers that put substance over style.
All too often, however, Eleven Minutes Away slip into territory where they have very little to separate them from any other band in the genre, hence the Silverstein-alike comparisons. ‘Shall I Happily’ chugs away nicely, while the intro to ‘I Am Tragedy’ is perhaps a little more like what we’d expect Deep Elm bands to sound like – but maybe that’s the point here. Maybe the label is fed up with the emo or indie rock stereotypes that people like me pin on them? Whatever the motivation was to do something a little different, it certainly jolted me into thinking ‘this is different’ – even if, in the context of popular music, it all sounds a bit the same…
www.11minutesaway.com
Deep Elm
Paul