Review Summary: A despairing look into one of Post-Rock/Post-Hardcores finest bands...
Eleventh He Reaches London has always been a quintessential post-rock/post-hardcore band. The feel of raw emotion mixed with strong, powerful lyrics makes for a listening experience. The follow-up to their 2003 EP, Diving for Treacher, The Good Fight for Harmony is as solid an effort a band can produce. One ability this band has is the mastery of switching between a melodic depressing soft section to a heavy screaming-filled segment, and back again. The Good Fight for Harmony is a heartfelt album sure to entrap your mind throughout the length of your time spent enjoying it.
The first song on the album, “Coronation”, is an instrumental track that mixes sadness and repetition of a common melody to fully immerse you in the album from the get-go. It has a feel to it that holds true through the rest of the album and carries beautifully into the next offering, “Say You See Why So”. The guitar work on this track is probably some of the best on the album. Ian Lenton’s vocals portray the miserable feel of mistrust that the song speaks about perfectly.
“Swarming” and “What Would Don Juan Say” are two of the heaviest tracks this band has ever released. The guitar chugging in Swarming puts out an aura of anger that this band encapsulates oh-so-well. This is as close to a modern-day epic as can be. The mellow, yet still heavy, guitar riff behind the sorrow-filled lyrics in WWDJS develops into one of the angriest “breakdowns” in the last 45 seconds that yet again flows wonderfully into the eerie filler track “Ruination”.
The album slows down after that with the track “Chilson”. This soft, easy-going track still has the depressing feel as the rest of the album, but just does it without having to be heavy. The track starts picking up the angry emotion towards the end that leads into the last song “Long Grows The List Of The Live And Dead Pretenders”.
Over all, the album is a near-masterpiece. The pure despair this album oozes out in every song is enough to make any true post-rock listener fall in love, but add to the fact the band itself has the talent to play their instruments and be able to keep the passion flowing through-out shows that Eleventh He Reaches London is a band, no…a FORCE…to be reckoned with.
Recommended Tracks:
Say You See Why So
Swarming
Long Grows The List Of The Live And Dead Pretenders
