After they released The Good Fight for Harmony – their accomplished, acclaimed, bat-shit crazy first album – Eleventh He Reaches London’s career paradoxically slowed. They rehearsed seldom, performed less, and the prospect of a second album seemed far-fetched. Then one day they realised that it was now or never, slapped themselves in the face, and wrote and recorded an album at breakneck speed. The result is Hollow Be My Name.

This story explains a lot. Hollow Be My Name has near-schizophrenic variety on it. Parts of the album reveal its kinship with Good Fight, particularly the title track and its single ‘Girt By Piss’. These are fast-paced post-metal jitterbugs that substantially mirror their Byzantine early work, but elsewhere are songwriting revelations. ‘Son, You’re Almost an Orphan’, a ballad, uses acoustic guitar and banjo and runs only a little over three minutes, while ‘Oh, Brother’ irons out the quirks that Eleventh made their name on – unrelated parts mashed together in random yet logical sequences – to become a medium-paced quasi-hardcore song. These are all things nobody ever thought they’d live to see the band attempt.

However, they are predominantly placeholders between the more gigantic songs: ‘I Am the Bearer, I Stand in Need’ and ‘For the Commonwealth and the Queen’. ‘I Am the Bearer’ idles in a low gear for half its length then suddenly picks up with the introduction of blazing, Metallica-style riffs, while ‘For the Commonwealth and the Queen’ successfully reworks its theme across 11 minutes of mythic, metal adventure.

It’s an odd combination of textures, but one that works because of Eleventh’s use of Australian folklore, history and identity as its lyrical subject matter. This is a more ambitious project than the personal confession that Good Fight served, but one with a similar effect – a rousing, masculinist thrill. Hollow Be My Name has more missteps than their last album, but these come about as the side effect of experimentation that has resulted in work as good, if not better than anything they’ve done before.

by Matt Giles