The Eleventh Hour

Christian rock gets knocked for its tendency toward sunny self-satisfaction; here, promisingly, Jars of Clay push the pendulum the other way, not afraid to pepper their claymaker with tough questions. (Subtextually, that is—there’s just one overt deistic shout-out.) But this dark-night-of-the-soul stuff is couched in such mopey, antiseptic arrangements that even Jars’ most skyward material reminds you of nothing so much as matchbox twenty’s navel-gazing. B-