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RECORD REVIEW: The Birthday Suit - The Eleventh Hour

The Birthday Suit – The Eleventh Hour

Released 11^th November 2011 via Sing It Alone Records

With Idlewild currently on hiatus,guitarist/songwriter Rod Jones has had a bit of time on his hands. However, rather than sitting on his laurels and getting some serious reading done, Jones decided to put his efforts into brand new solo project The Birthday Suit. Their debut album The Eleventh Hour is set for hardcopy release on 11^th November 2011, but fanboys and girls are already clambering over one another’s bandwidth to grab a digital prerelease from the band’s website.

On first listen of album opener Do You Ever? you begin to see where all this pant-wetting anticipation has stemmed from. A giant, booming rawkfest of an introduction, Do You Ever? is one of those huge, noisy spine tingling affairs that makes you feel justified in having splashed out so much on that oversized pair of headphones or massive speaker system.

Suddenly, in a quicker transition than Kubrick’s infamous cutscene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we are dropped straight into second track Hope Me Home. With hard grinding guitars interspersed throughout, Hope Me Home swiftly changes pace into the kind of semi-orchestral rock that made Biffy Clyro such national treasures. However, rather than harking back to old Biffy before the release of their 2009 fanbase splitter Only Revolutions, Jones and co. seem to have chosen the less demanding route. The track gives off an air of scotch jig crossed with choir-filled Christmas song, but at the same time lets anything truly interesting fall by the wayside.

Moving onward, spiralling slow-burner They Say I Love You slips into quiet-loud mode as it offers up enchanted lyrics:

//They say I love you so it must be true,

A film about a love that we never knew//

The power of these words dwindles, however, once you realise that part of the lyric makes up the song’s title and that it’s poised to be repeated several times more throughout the song.

Simple, yet effective, On My Own leaps into a speeding space age riff that could easily sit on a Placebo album while Sell It All manages to trundle along until hitting an infinitely more intriguing climax than it appeared to be building towards.

After such a raucous start with Do You Ever? you can’t help but feel that the rest of the album fails to reach the same heights. World Gone By creates a slight atmosphere as does A Nation, but nothing in comparison to the steep expectations created by the record’s opener.

Album middler Are You OK? offers the first real knees-up of the album. With tender lyrics and metallic guitar riffs layered over a fling-like backdrop the track could quite easily feature on the soundtrack of any immeasurably quaint romantic comedy set in the Highlands.

Staying true to the traditional jig ambience, Don’t Look Down combines simple piano with leaping melody under purring guitar. The Eleventh Hour’s limbo-induced title track then follows and seems almost ironic as it drags itself along unnoticed. Finally, laden with muted bass and raw piano, album ender Talking Over You amply wraps things up as it whisks you off to that proverbial happy place.

Starting with such big hopes only to then fall over itself, The Eleventh Hour feels a lot like the recordings of a band who haven’t quite found their sound yet. There are sparks of brilliance dotted throughout this record (which should be expected with a list of musical credits as long as Jones’) however, if The Birthday Suit plan on going any further, they might first want to try centring on a more coherent sound.

Richard Kemp