What Do You Think Of Finger Eleven’s New Album? #hardrock

Just the thought of post-Nickelback hard rock may nauseate you, but three factors may tempt you to give a fair listen to Finger Eleven’s new album, Five Crooked Lines: One, they’re from Canada and therefore likely way less macho/whiny than America’s “active rock” regulars. Two, they’ve won a Juno Award, which is semi-meaningful unlike America’s crappy music honors. And three, it takes so little to get excited about even the distant prospect of “great hard rock” — stuff that’s snappy and self-aware like Queens Of The Stone Age and Bruce Dickinson’s Skunkworks, and maybe transcendent like Cave In’s Antenna and Stone Temple Pilots’ Shangri La-Di-Da. Muse- or Strung Out-type jams, even. We can dream.

About the creation of Five Crooked Lines, the band explains that they “would write three or four songs and be happy with one of them. [In every] new batch, we’d have one song that would be cooler than the rest and that would raise the bar. By the time we were ready to record, we had a killer batch of songs to choose from.” That’s believable, but we might wager that one or two of the less-cool jams made the album, probably right in its first act. That seems bad, but it really helps to draw the arch of Lines; it lowers expectations and weeds out the ungenerous. Everyone who stays for more is in for, like, ten consecutive dark, steady aces. What do you think!

Finger Eleven’s Five Crooked Lines is out today via The Bicycle Music Company. Get it here.