Album Review - Brian Johnson's Love Came Down!

This quiet and intimate offering from Brian Johnson is an excellent, excellent example of how to do an acoustic worship set right. Though recorded way back in 2009 (it only hit our shores recently), it's timely, relevant and deeply affecting.

The setting's a little strange - it's live worship in the studio (so is it a live album or a studio recording?) - but it works marvelously towards building an atmosphere of deep, reflective worship. The audio is well-recorded and perfectly mixed - every voice and instrument playing its own part but never ever overwhelming the other.

It's kinda like throwing a bunch of different ingredients into a blender and turning it into a puree - you can't tell where one ingredient ends and the other begins, but it call comes together in a tasteful package that just adds to the overall enjoyment (sorry for the food analogy, the Mrs. and I have been fascinated to no end lately by Junior Masterchef Australia).

Although every song is performed by only 3 instruments at the maximum (acoustic guitar + piano + cello/hammered dulcimer), it never sounds sparse - a testament both to the brilliant arrangements of the songs as well as the ingenious mixing. The songs themselves are well-suited for the acoustic setting, quietly restrained but never feeling as if they are held back.

What I really really really love about this album is the deep sense of worship that pervades every song, every note, every melody. It's easy to record a bunch of songs, but to imbue the songs and the album with such a strong spirit of worship requires the artist to really be worshipping - and that's exactly what Brian Johnson and the musicians and singers are precisely doing.

Listening to the album is great, but watching the accompanying DVD makes it even easier for you to feel like you're part of the worship session.

Here's the title track, Love Came Down:



And my personal favourite song on the album, Show Me Your Face (unfortunately I can't find the full song on youtube - so go buy the album already):



All in all, this is an album I whole-heartedly recommend:









Quiet but never sleepy; intimate and deeply worshipful - this album makes a perfect companion for devotions or times when you just need to get on your knees and seek the Lord.

And for all the other times when you just want to take a break from all the typically loud and noisy P&W albums out there, this album is it.

In a time when putting out an acoustic album means replacing more instruments on the band with acoustic guitars (but still having one electric guitar - CHEATS!), and replacing electric synthesizers with grand pianos, Brian Johnson's Love Came Down is the benchmark against which all acoustic albums will be measured.

And right now, it's standing in a class of it's own.

Album Review - Soul Survivor & Momentum's Light The Sky!

This double CD features live praise and worship recorded live at Soul Survivor (CD1) and Momentum (CD2) 2010.

The Soul Survivor CD is, without a doubt, the best album to come out of the movement as yet. While SS is not generally known for their original songs - they either do covers of P&W songs by other churches/bands, or the worship leader e.g. Tim Hughes or Matt Redman usually elect to do their own songs), the original songs on this CD are well-written and arranged, and in fact form the spiritual core of the album - the main messages reside in this songs, and the other songs feel a little more peripheral.

A good example is the anthemic Praise Overflows. The utterly simple 2-line chorus is an invitation to every listener to sing along:



That's not to say that the covers on this CD are lacklustre - they are anything but. Tim Hughes' Holding Nothing Back, Chris Tomlin's Our God and Hillsong United's No Reason To Hide are perfect covers of the originals - in fact, Our God sounds better here than it did on Passion's Awakening.

But the real brilliant songs are also the most unexpected. When I first heard that SS would be covering Phil Wickham's Cielo (you can listen to the original here) on this album, I was a bit leery. It's a great song, but to do it live as part of a worship set? It'll either bomb magnificently, or it'll light up the stratosphere. Either way, it'd be a grand show.

I am very happy to report that it had the latter effect - it became a soaring anthem of worship that is at once grand and yet deeply personal:



The other unexpectedly great song is John Mark McMillan's How He Loves. How do you take a song that has been done to death and covered ad nauseum, ad infinitum and give it a breath of freshness? Simple - put Beth Croft's lovely vocals on it, and then throw in an unexpected but totally appropriate twist right at the end:



The CD does make some missteps, such as the cover of the old hymn Nothing But The Blood (sounds awfully like a rip-off of what Brooke Fraser did on United's excellent I Heart Revolution) as well as the link into Hillsong's Saviour King from Cielo - which killed the awesome vibe created by Cielo, not to mention the fact that Jamie Rodwell seemed to have forgotten all the other parts of the chorus.

Other than that, I can't really find much fault with this CD. So, in totality, the Soul Survivor CD gets:










Unfortunately, I can't say the same about the Momentum CD. Other than it being ridiculously short (5 songs?!), the quality of the songs as well as the audio engineering just doesn't quite measure up with the standard set by the SS CS. Besides totally wrecking Hillsong's Our God Is Love (to be fair, the original version is tough to beat), the cover of the Mark Altrogge classic Beautiful Beyond Description was flat and uninspired.

Probably the only saving grace is the Tim Hughes song All Glory:



Other than that, the Momentum CD is drab and pretty much a disappointment. It gets:










In all, I'd say that the album as a whole is still worth getting, based on the remarkable strength of the SS CD. If you haven't got it yet, you should.

Feel free to give the Momentum CD a spin too. If you don't like it, you can do what I did -

Delete the Momentum songs off your iPod.