Stumbling across this one was a fun one because I can immediately recognize that I would've hated this with extreme prejudice ten or so years ago. On principle, simply being a hard rock band instead of a metal one was an inconceivable sin to the dumbass teenage version of myself. Why play rock when you could just be faster and heavier instead? Do you not like adventure?? Inject some god damned danger into your veins you cowards! Fuck outta here with this weak ass 80s wannabe shit and play some fuckin' Slayer.
Hearing this now, inching ever closer to my thirties, I can appreciate something like Cil City for the fun throwback that it is. Jump Off the Cliff is still sorta foreign to me, but thanks to my wife being a gigantic fan of The Pretty Reckless, I've sorta grown to jive well enough with this more modern brand of female-fronted hard rock. I only know like, I dunno, two or three Halestorm songs? But Cil City reminds me of them anyway, they both have a similar Harley-revving, hotel-crashing, whiskey-chugging, switchblade-spinning, devil-may-care attitude to their craft that's just damn fun.
Jump Off the Cliff isn't a perfect album of course. It falls victim to many of the tropes of hard rock where the more upbeat party-friendly songs are much more entertaining than the more restrained singalong moments. "Shout It Out", for example, feels like pure filler, which is a huge problem on an album with only eight tracks, while the title track and "She's Rock n' Roll" are much more energetic anthems that get your blood pumping and stick in your head better. Cil City is, frankly, just not very good at ballads. "This Road Won't Take Me Home" and "#8" are completely inconsequential and do absolutely nothing for me, while "Freedom" or "Jump Off the Cliff" make me want to kick open the door to a dive bar and fistfight the nearest guy with a beard thicker than my thigh.
This ends up being an album of two halves as a result, with four hard rocking anthems and four waify dullards, and it certainly doesn't help that it almost perfectly flip flops between the two. It starts with two raucous rock songs, two sedated ballads, and then the B side flip flops perfectly between the two for each track. So it's no surprise that the title track, "She's Rock n' Roll", "Freedom", and "Changes" are a hundred times better than "Shout It Out", "This Road Won't Take Me Home", "Fears in My Head", and "#8". It almost feels like a different band with how drastically the level in songwriting dips, really. Maybe this makes me the dullard who can't appreciate subtlety, but I know what interests me, and it's not acoustic ballads with no hooks.
Maybe the fuckin' Slayer part of me never died, or maybe Cil City is just better at one style over another. Occam's Razor says the answer is both.
RATING: 60%
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