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.
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