Finger Eleven’s Them Vs. You Vs. Me is already a Gold record Stateside, but - at the risk of sounding as cynical as I am - that’s rarely a metric of quality at the best of times, and less so as the weeks pass by. Big-selling rock albums tend to suffer from trying either to be everything to everyone (losing all sense of individuality in the process) or plying the cheap sentiment card (Chad Kroeger, I’m looking at you).
Thankfully, Them Vs. You Vs. Me is actually pretty decent by comparison, though nothing that I’d want to evangelise about. Finger Eleven (despite having what appears to be a misplaced innuendo for a band name, which is only slightly preferable to their original moniker of Rainbow Butt Monkeys) play solid, radio-friendly alt-rock music that steers clear out of being insipid or hollow. The lyrics are earnest, but with enough ambiguity to make them a mirror for the listener - no spoon-feeding stories here - and there’s an understated smattering of extra instruments broadens the standard rock sound pallet, providing a rare sense of variety.
Finger Eleven’s precise genre affiliations are hard to classify, which definitely works in their favour; the heritage lies in post-grunge, but there’s none of the tawdry sentiment and stodgy repetition that the Creeds and Nickelbacks of the world have foisted off on us. Finger Eleven write - gasp! - songs that sound different from one another, while still retaining a sound of their own. The main bonding agent in this case is Scott Anderson’s vocals, which are gruff without being tough, and delivered with an honesty that - while it may lack the force of his peers - goes a long way to making you want to pay attention to what he has to say.
With the exception of “Paralyser”, there’s no obvious stand-out candidates for the next single, though my money would go on the next in sequence, “Falling On”, whose choppy riff and contrasting verse-chorus structure hung around in my head the longest after the album was finished. That said, the quality is uniform throughout Them Vs. You Vs. Me, with a notable lack of filler except the mawkish balladeering of “I’ll Keep Your Memory Vague”, which isn’t so much bad as it is playing on all Finger Eleven’s weaknesses at once; it would have been better as a more minimal piece, and placed nearer to the end of the track list. By comparison, “Change The World” comes across as far more sincere and much less forced; swapping their places would change the character of the album considerably.
According to the press release in front of me, Finger Eleven wrote many of these tracks by exchanging part-finished files over the internet, each musician presumably working on their parts in isolation until the final recordings were assembled. This methodology - while intriguing, and very “now” - may go some way to explain why Them Vs. You Vs. Me lacks that spark that raises competent material to the level of potential hits.
Maybe it’s old fashioned of me, but I’m a great believer in the power of synthesis - the magic that emerges from a group of musicians working together in close real-time proximity, everyone bouncing ideas and energy off each other. There’s no denying Finger Eleven can write a good tune, but I can’t help but feel there’s a little extra distance that could have been travelled.
Overall, Them Vs. You Vs. Me is a pretty decent album that should appeal to a wide spectrum of non-specialist rock listeners. I’ll be surprised to hear that anyone ever claims that Finger Eleven changed their life, though.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: alternative, Finger Eleven, grunge, post-grunge, rock, Them Vs. You Vs. Me
