I think what blew everyone away is that SigSound hauled in their whole lights/sound/backdrop, etc., for the show. They were dressed to the nines, etc., just as if it were a real concert. Ben Speer [who owns and runs the school] was visibly impressed with their show, and made jokes about adding a dance class to next year’s school, but he didn’t do it in a condescending way, but in a very flattering way, actually.  No real surprises to their show, other just really giving it 110%.

Another correspondent confirmed this view:

At first I didn’t know why the group brought the “full enchilada.” Most acts come in casually and that’s understandable because it’s a summer school, but afterward I understood why they did it. The kids loved it. And they appeared to be buying a bunch of a product after the show.

Smart stuff indeed. I mean, it’s an audience of a coupla hundred kids who for the most part all want to be or become EHSSQ. If your audience has visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads, it doesn’t hurt to show up in a big fat candy truck.

And anyway, it probably wasn’t that big of a deal for the group to pull the full enchilada since they were headed to the Gaither mothership for the Cathedrals tribute taping. The only complaint-like thing I’ve heard about the performance was their decision to sing “Old Convention Song.” And it was an odd choice. Despite the title, it’s not actually an old convention song, of course. Rather it’s about a bunch of other songs that are really old convention tunes. I mean, sure, they were probably rehearsing material for the Cats tribute album, since the Cats popularized the song way back when, but still … if you’re at a singing school that teaches convention singing, why not sing… you know, an actual convention song?

A few days later, the group recorded the Cats tribute. Daniel Mount has a descriptive summary of the event. So does Nate. Aside from a clunky segment with Bill Gaither near the middle of the show and an overheated auditorium that required a lot of breaks for makeup reapplication, it sounds like it went smoothly, at least from the email I’ve received (I’ve asked a friend to repost her email in comments for all to see).

In other words, Signature Sound has been a bunch of busy beavers. A recent commenter on another thread wonders why EHSSQ has largely stopped putting out new material since Dream On, but I suspect the group is playing a longer game than the one that measures a quartet’s success by whether it has a new project every year full of mostly mediocre tunes with a few cuts respectable enough to go to radio. They’ve spent the last few years establishing themselves at an increasing distance from the Homecoming crowd without actually breaking ties with Gaitherland. And now comes the Cats tribute recording, which will, I imagine, probably more or less cement the group’s claim to the George and Glen legacy, at least as a brand (that is, selling product and putting butts in seats  by using the group’s connection to the Cats).

Thus, new music is really beside the point. They can do that, but so can (and does) everyone else. For EHSSQ it’s not really what their brand is about, as far as I can tell. And if this approach sounds familiar, … well, it is. In fact, it’s basically the Homecoming model writ small in a single group: Old favorites and a smattering of new stuff held together by a signature style. The glue is not the “new” but a certain way of producing and arranging and, of course, a very meticulously cultivated brand of singing and showmanship.

Sure, the breathy singing makes me wince, and the some of the more peacocky pretensions of the group’s onstage persona can be off putting, and Ernie’s emcee work gives me the willies a lot of the time and no they can’t really dance … but blah blah blah. It’s hard to argue with their commitment to what they see as their vision of quality or excellence or whatever you want to call it. And they’ve got the popularity and the success to show for it. This is impressive, particularly at a time when what are typically considered top-tier acts in the bidness count singing to a few hundred people at any given venue a good night. In other words, a lot of groups like to ride on the big-fish/small-bowl reputation of themselves as top-tier sg acts, but very few groups are actually achieving top-tier status in terms that wouldn’t be laughed at out outside sg. Or as one reader put it to me in an email:

Maybe I’m just drinking the Signature Sound kool-aid these days, but you know what? They give a damn. They really do, and you can see it in their shows: they’re in shape and take care about their appearance and style. And from a performance angle, you don’t get that kind of precision on stage without rehearsing hours a day. And when you do that, then you can go out on stage and have fun for two hours! Because they know what they’re doing and they’re not stepping all over each other’s lines and pissed off at each other for screwing things up or missing opportunities. And then, when the concert is over and they stand around in their sweaty suits signing autographs and talking to fans for as long as it takes.

Maybe that’s why they can go to Lancaster, PA (no southern gospel stronghold!) and sell thousands of tickets (I’d guess upwards of 2500-3000ish when I saw them) and move a ton a product, if their table traffic is any rough guide.

A few weeks ago, I caught Gold City and frankly, it disgusted me. Seriously. I’ve been in the business for decades and I love it. Love it death, but unfortunately I think that’s what’s happening to so much of the music: a slow, agonizing death by the lazy performance of countless sloppy songs. Watching Gold City, I saw these arrogant men in their S&K suits get up there looking bored out of their minds belching out the same songs they’ve been wheeling out of cold storage for 20 years and they wonder why they can’t sell records anymore. Well, out of the 200 people who came to see you the night I was there (no doubt many of them out of respect for how you used to sing and perform), probably 150 of them will be dead in five years so you better come up with some new schtick fast because the clock is ticking on your tiny little kingdom, mister.

The arguments against EHSS are personal tastes for the most part. I have not seen any argument against EHSS that are substantive. For the most part they have been made by people from a distance. When the attacks on their style didn’t work then the personal attacks started. This is typical of politics and personally I feel that it is counterproductive to the ultimate goal of all that are involved with and care for SG.

That may be an accurate description of opportunistic attacks on EHSSQ, but that certainly doesn’t mean a substantive case can’t be made against the them – or for that matter, a lot of other Christian entertainment and evangelical popular culture (where I think Joel Osteen and his ilk rightfully belong).

Specifically, the centrality of what I’ve called glamour and flamboyance in Christian entertainment might make the glamorous and flamboyant rock stars of evangelicalism – whether EHSSQ or Joel Osteen or Joyce Meyer – vulnerable to the criticism that by insisting or letting people believe they’re gospel ministers in one form or another, they’re essentially selling cheap grace that more or less equates fabulousness with faith (or in the Meyer and Osteen vernacular: God wants you to be rich). Which is to say, matters of style and questions of aesthetics become issues of substance.

That’s not to say Ernie Haase is indistinguishable from Joel Osteen. I personally find it difficult to take a lot of Christian entertainment – again, I’m counting Osteen and Meyer and that crowd in this category – terribly seriously. It’s just so … campy and ridiculously outsized. Watching that trailer of EHSSQ and seeing how seriously they take themselves, even in their lighthearted moments, I muttered to myself, “it’s like irony never happened.” A few seconds later: “or maybe the whole thing is one big festival of irony.” Either way: joke’s on me.

But at least EHSSQ is entertaining (Osteen and Meyer just leave me vaguely nauseated). This is not because EHSSQ or most of my favorite gospel music strikes me as deeply thought-out religious discourse or finely wrought statements about religious living, but because it’s fun and funny and … well, fabulous, in the high-camp sense of that word.

One commenter recently called it “cheesy.” And that’s probably right. But since when did cheese disqualify something from being a commercially viable form of entertainment, especially in the Christian world? Cheese only matters in a bad way if you’re making certain assumptions about what religious entertainment ought to be and do. And too many people on either side of the debate have never really explored or articulated their own assumptions about the standards they’re applying to Christian entertainment. And this leads people mounting an attack – on, say, EHSSQ – to flail and flounder and make everything personal. Or as Buick put it:

I suspect some of the negative feeling toward EH is the notion that he didn’t earn his place in SG music. Some (erroneously) believe that George hired his son-in-law to sing tenor. In fact, EH married the boss’s daughter because he was already singing for the Cats before he dated and married. Some believe that he didn’t earn the exposure that EHSSQ has enjoyed, BG gave it to them as a favor to George.

The fact is, EH may have got some breaks along the way but he also appears to have made the most of them. And that counts for something…even if I don’t care for his voice.

There’s not enough of this rightheadedness out there.

The biggest problem, on both sides of the Ernie debate, as with so many similar arguments about ministry/monestry, phoney/authentic, godly/worldly, is that so many entertainers or their fans try to deflect criticism of the entertainment by referencing the ministerial or spiritual function the music serves, when what they’re really about is entertaining Christians. Would it be so bad if ministry (whatever that means) was but one of several effects among many, and perhaps not even the primary effect at that, of Christian entertainment?

Judging by many comments here and elsewhere, yes … it would be pretty bad indeed for many people (we’ll set aside the real possibility that what most Christian entertainers define as ministry is actually entertainment and vice versa). A lot of evangelicals (maybe most?) have come to believe that entertainment – even, or especially Christian entertainment – is bad bad bad unless it’s slathered over with a layers of altar-calling and come to Jesus pietism. Evangelicalism comes by it honestly. Most Puritans didn’t sing with instruments for fear of making the psalm-singing too enjoyable. But at least they were honest about it.

These day’s, it’s a tough call as to who’s more annoying: people who insist that all Christian entertainment be full-blown soul-saving operations, or the entertainers who don’t believe this is true but pretend they do anyway.

Hey Mr Editor-guy,

I’m wondering why you think there are all these Ernie-haters out there? Is it jealousy? I mean, Ernie is just as nice and just as normal (which means he has his faults) as anybody else out there.

On the one hand, I don’t really get all the Ernie hating either. EHSSQ hasn’t done anything more or less outrageous than other groups –whether we’re speaking sartorially, choreographically, or aesthetically.

What they have done is succeed, or else done a really good job of playing the part of what the small-time gospel music world thinks big-time success looks like (for the record, I think it’s mainly the former). So, on the other hand, harshing on EH makes a lot of sense. Partly it may be professional and personal jealousy. But it’s probably a lot more complicated than that.

The ubiquitous cult of personality in gospel music has its roots in a conservative evangelical deference to authority and power figures. Iconic singers and stars aren’t icons just because we like their music. As with all entertainment figures, southern gospel stars represent at some level a projection of what audiences ideally imagine about themselves and want from the world or and their lives in it. In Christian music, the spiritual and religious dimension of the entertainment only intensifies the ties that bind fans to their favorites. The connection isn’t just personal; it’s eternal, metaphysical, potentially salvific.

In this context, EH’s rise to fame has to be understood as the symbolic success of a certain set of unconventional values and aspirations that challenge the status quo of southern gospel culture. For those people who came down more on the Scott Fowler/Roger Bennett side of the Ernie/Scott divide in the post-Cathedrals years, EHSSQ’s emergence as a hot ticket might well seem like a repudiation of whatever core values or conventional ideals people wanted to believe the Cathedrals represented. Thus all the suggestions that Ernie is somehow a usurper or a phony or worse because he married into the Younce family. The clear (and fairly preposterous) implication seems to be that George Younce was somehow forced by his daughter’s marriage to “side” with Ernie when what he really wanted to do was pass the torch to Scott and Roger. Royght.

EH and SSQ are arguably flashier, explicitly sexier, and unabashedly more ambitious than probably any other gospel act on the road today. Observe, dear readers, this trailer’s unsubtle hat-tips to Broadway, Vegas, and the “blockbuster” culture of mainstream big-budget roll-outs:

They aren’t the first to take this approach. But they are alone among the current crop of top-tier gospel artists in robustly succeeding thanks to a formula that pretty willfully dispenses with all but the most perfunctory or obligatory acts of self-deprecation or self-denials or “we’re just tryin’ to be a blessing” demurrals that southern gospel fans expect from groups that enjoy a great deal of success. Why do you think Bill Gaither plays up his stutter? Or George Younce made old-man jokes about Glen Payne (indeed, though Payne and Haase represent two very different on-stage personalities, I’ve often thought Payne, with his hard-driving style and non-nonsense “here’s your change who’s next” business style, was actually the truer ancestor to Haase’s take-no-prisoners approach to success, no matter how cloying Ernie is on stage). Look too quickly at that clip and you might miss that this is a southern gospel quartet. And that, I think, is a big part of the point.

In gospel music, it’s ok to succeed, but it’s dangerous to succeed in a way that sharpens the economic, social, or cultural differences between the fan and the performer. And so, while EHSSQ’s flashiness, their flamboyant fashionability, their eager appropriation of styles and approaches from American popular culture – while not bothering with any “reclaim the devil’s music for the Lord” apologetics – obviously appeals to a lot of people who like to live the gospel rock-star lifestyle vicariously through EHSSQ (a friend of mine who attended the Dream On taping said she saw alot of what looked like Mennonite women), it’s also an approach that runs the risk of rubbing a lot of other people the wrong way - people who want their music to reinforce their worldview and self-image, not provide an escape from it or glamorize other ways of religious living.

And so for these people, a group like EHSSQ has the potential to make them feel outclassed or shown up or played for the fool. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that (in fact it’s often easier to defend forms of pop culture as art if they push people out of their comfort zones), but it might help explain the Ernie-hating cottage industry in sg.

More interesting than the anti-Hendrix crowd, who perhaps predictably assumes this is another paper hit generated by Hendrix & Co.’s, uhm, aggressive approach to radio promoting, is the pro-Hendrix crowd. Instead of arguing that the EHSSQ song is a good example of the SN radio chart working – and maybe even vindicating (just a little) the hired-gun approach to song promotion – these folks are using this as proof that Hendrix ought to be given a position on the SN Chart Advisory Committee. The thinking here seems to be that if a Hendrix song can get to No. 1 after the SN reforms (and more than a few people suspect the reforms were aimed squarely at promoters like Hendrix), then the reforms are clearly worthless and the SN ought to take the “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” approach to Hendrix and the Chart Advisory panel.

Now, as I say, I think this is a strategic mistake argumentatively on the part of Hendrix’s supporters. But whatever. I don’t have a dog in the Hendrix fight. I’m more interested in the fact that it seems to have occurred to no one that “Get Away” might actually be No. 1 because it’s a … you know, very popular song. EHSSQ is probably the hottest act going in sg right now and a pretty hot ticket in Christian entertainment generally. So it seems more than plausible that their sexed-up version of an old standard would generate a genuine response from radio audiences. At least it would be in keeping with the trend of their widespread appeal lately.

I’m not saying the SN chart isn’t deeply flawed or that the radio promotion racket (and all those artists who prop it up) aren’t part of the problem. But no matter what is contributing to the problem, the realest problem in all this might be that even when the closest thing to a legitimate No. 1 song in sg comes along, nobody’s first thought it is that the chart reflects reality. This sort of PR problem is of a magnitude that almost ensures the chart is beyond repair in its current form. Which is to say, the “Get Away” example suggests it’s not a matter of reforms one or way another, but of an irreparably damaged perception.

One final thought: Let me put this another way. Why does a song as popular as “Get Away” genuinely seems to be need a high-octane promoter like Hendrix in the first place? Or any promoter at all? I think I’m actually asking.

The Woods started their “tour” following Signature Sound [around the country] in 2003 and have not missed a concert since. The Woods have attended over 50 concerts in 16 different states.

The Woods get involved with the group during the concerts. They have even become a prop for the group to play off of.

“I always yell ‘Get it right’ to one of the members onstage and they play off of that,” said Bobby. “They always expect it and play along as if they never heard me say it before.”

Alrighty then. I’m sure these people mean well, and I don’t doubt for a second that EHSSQ has been entirely generous, kind, and welcoming of Bobby and Hilda on and off the stage. But I can also only imagine how – after FOUR YEARS of seeing them on the front row every night – this might get a little tiresome, waiting for the appointed time during each concert when these two mildly obsessed fans decide to make themselves a “prop for the group to play off.”

It’s good to have hobbies, but limits are good, too.

I mean, I know Wilburn and Ladd are trying to be funny and “just joshin with Ole Ernie … we love i’m.” But don’t you think some of the other guys seem a bit uncomfortable (look at Daniel Riley, for instance)? And with good reason. I’d be uncomfortable too if I were on camera and Jonathan Wilburn was speaking on my behalf. There’s something about this schtick … a not-entirely-joking quality, or a thread of contempt to the aggressiveness of the humor. Something that makes this hard to watch. But then I don’t find Wilburn to be a very funny guy in the first place. So maybe it’s just me.

Post Script: I honestly can’t tell if this was intended for mass consumption or not. It looks like an out-take, which could mean they thought it’d get edited out. But surely no performers in the age of the internet are unaware that anything recorded can end up online. Surely?

Update: Commenter dd helps out with some context:

it has been out for little bit and it’s actually on their myspace site. But boy Danny does look miffed and uncomfortable at the same time. But probably if he didn’t want it on there it would not have been posted. At the same time these guys see each other all the time and have known each other forever. I’m glad Jonathan can sing……

Later update: Commenter Big Ken turns up the volume on the clip and notices something I’d missed the first time round:

It’s obvious that Ladd and Wilburn have watched a lot of professional “wrasslin’” from the way they challenged Haase and his crew to a steel cage match in Madison Square Garden. What really cracked me up, though, was Aaron McCune’s almost inaudible comment at the end. After Wilburn said that he loved Ernie, Aaron said, “I don’t.” Priceless.

Even later update: Jonathan Wilburn writes:

Hey everybody! Ernie is a friend of mine. Has been for many years. There are friends I can cut up with and they know it is just good ole fun. I had no ill will in my heart for this great bunch of guys. Do any of you remember when George and JD went back and forth? Man the memories we would have missed if they had kept all that private! As far as what I do on stage. NOT GOING TO CHANGE!

Just on the non-Gaither purchases, Get Away Jordan did extraordinarily well by pretty much any southern gospel standard. Indeed, even gospel albums that play really well on radio might not sell as well in any given week three or four months out from release as EHSSQ did on its own - minus those “non-traditional” Homecoming sales - with this album’s debut. And/but clearly the Gaither brand adds substantial value to an already popular product.

Mount supplies the joyful noisers’ answer to this question, which basically amounts to “anything for Jesus.” And though I’m on record as being skeptical of the (to me, dubious) proposition that gospel music is primarily about conversion and evangelizing, I’m sure for his part Ernie Haase means every word of his statement about sellling “a gospel tract.” But let’s not kid ourselves. Plenty of people like EHSSQ’s brand of gospel music because it comes with a generous helping of strutty, jiggly eye candy wrapped in a postmodern-retro style that manages to both revere and exploit the male quartet tradition. As RF puts it, EHSSQ’s act has something that appeals to just about everyone - “From the bartender at the Moose Lodge to a twenty-something lady with multiple tatoos” - if they’re inclined to stop and listen, or just watch.

For my part, I’ve got the cd in my car (see here for an explanation of why the dvd is still in its shrink wrap and likely to stay that way for a while), and there are a few tracks on it I can’t stop listening to, especially “Until We Fly Away” (which is pure GVB circa Testify, only with a real bass singer and more reliable lead, and more generally the direction I’d like to see them go consistently). It’s a good album with a few great moments on it, but there’s a spastic quality to the song selection that makes it difficult to know what – beyond being a group that sells gobs of records – EHSSQ wants to be musically, artistically (there’s traditional quartet numbers here, contemporary style pieces, a few power ballads, some patriotic stuff, a strange frolicsome thing that reminds me of an Alvin and Chipmunks cut, a live reprised “Get Away” and two covers of old Cats’ standards). Listening to the cd, which is very well sung but stylistically restless and suffering from a kind of artistic ADD, is like trying to look through all three ranges of a tri-focal lens at once.

Whether intentional or just the default position that a charmed life with Gaither has evolved into for EHSSQ, this trifocal vision of themselves works just fine, obviously, so long as the group’s eclecticism carries Bill Gaither’s blessing. Indeed, I’m sure the Homecoming seal of approval – and all the sales it brings – accounts for why EHSSQ is willing to risk being typecast as Gaither’s dancing monkeys.

*Update: Here, a bit more specifically, is what I mean by this remark: EHSSQ’s Gaither connection means their sales are atypical of those generated by other traveling quartets of their stature and type. Units-of-product-delivered for EHSSQ comes not only (and maybe not even primarily, indeed this is the question I have) from direct purchases of their cds/albums but also from Gaither promotions and product bundles tied to popular compilations of Homecoming music: buy the best of George Younce, for example, and get an EHSSQ Get Away Jordan dvd as a bonus (or vice versa). So if EHSSQ is selling, say, 100,000 units of product (and this is just a big round number I’m pulling out of the air for the sake of discussion), the really interesting number to know would be the one disaggregated from Homecoming specials. This number would begin to measure how much of EHSSQ’s sales come from straight-ahead direct purchases of their music as opposed to product sales tied to some kind of Homecoming merchandizing, which as we know creates its own ecnomic weather.

]]> http://averyfineline.com/2007/02/01/everybody-from-the-bartender-at-the-moose-lodge-to-a-twenty-something-lady-with-multiple-tatoos/feed/ http://averyfineline.com/2006/05/05/in-re-cleverness/ http://averyfineline.com/2006/05/05/in-re-cleverness/#comments Fri, 05 May 2006 21:06:36 +0000 Avery http://averyfineline.com/wordpresstest/2006/05/05/in-re-cleverness/ In re my comment about EHSSSQ soliciting “videos of kids who imitate his group’s exuberant performance moves on stage.” No matter who came up with the idea, I said, “it’s got legs.” … To which DA replies: “Let’s just hope they’re more rhythmical than the ones they’re aping!!!”

And to know why I say that, one need only listen to the way EHSSQ sings the last word of the song “Godspeed.” The word is “goodbye,” and the sound of it perfectly captures the exquisite impersonality of this self-titled project, the group’s first offering on the Gaither Music label. It’s a breathy falsetto, weightless and airy, like those rice cakes that were once all the rage among dieters and health-food types until we discovered that no matter how well something is composed, it needs to be enjoyable in the experience of consumption, needs to have flavor and texture, and not just be compositionally superior.

Song after song here has the sound of a tedious puzzler in which we are being asked to find synonyms for the word generic: “Shout Brother Shout” and “Do You Wanna Be Forgiven” are bubble gum tunes, resolving into mincing unison straight tones and knock-off jazzlite harmonics that would make even the Ray Conniff singers blush. Meanwhile, “Godspeed” sounds like the theme song to one of those quasi-clever 1980s sitcoms that were full of actors with feathered hair wearing garish sweaters. For some reason, producer Lari Goss decided to weigh the song down with ponderous instrumentals - sleepy horns, cheesy guitars, and velveteen electronic pianos - that seem more emotionally fitting for a high-school commencement performance of “Friends Are Friends Forever” than a song like “Godspeed,” whose cheeky hook and playful lyrics deserve the attention of a quick tempo and snappier vocals.

“Trying to Get a Glimpse” breaks up this serial schmaltz but only because it’s almost scandalous how hard the song tries to remind everyone that the EH part of EHSSQ is related to George Younce. Kin or not, it’s just too soon to re-record this song so near the Cats farewell recording of it and Younce’s towering lead performance (to say nothing of Younce’s death). Tim Duncan is a solid bass singer, but there’s nothing about his ability that ought to make anyone think now is the time for him to try to fill shoes that so recently belonged to one so great. If this is homage, it is poorly considered. If it’s standard bearing, the flag’s dragging the ground.

In the same vein, there’s “This Old House” … I mean, “This Old Place.” Coming on the heels of “Trying to Get a Glimpse,” it feels like a feebly mawkish attempt to give Ernie Haase his own house-metaphor song just like George had.

What makes this all the more regrettable and surprising is Gaither’s involvement here. While Gaither has so deftly guided EHSSQ into a powerful position as the fire-starting crowd-pleasers of the Homecoming tour and general pacesetter among the young quartets of gospel music, he would be hard-pressed to count this an equivalent musical success from the studio (which is not the same thing as a sales success, which I assume it is and will be). Instead, this project may be what vanity-by-proxy sounds like. Witness the opening lines of the Gaither-penned “Then Came the Morning,” full of the kind of muzaky unison singing that shows up on other Gaither projects when Gaither is indulging his inner art-house couture. It makes me think that maybe Goss and EHSSQ got hopped up on a little too much of the magic pixy dust that trails behind Gaither everywhere he goes these days and let the synergy get the better of their judgment. At least that’s about the only way I can explain how so many gifted artists produced such a common project.

“Pray For Me” is the most human song on this album, and so I enjoyed it the most, but about half way through it, I realized why that’s so: it’s a bluesy first-cousin to “Stand By Me,” right down to the same interval for the lead on the big-finish.

That leaves “Goodbye Egypt, Hello Canaan Land” and “Forgiven Again.” The first is a derivative little ditty that hops along nicely. The second is a tune from Gloria and Benji Gaither that’s the project’s big power ballad, and it fills that pigeonhole just fine, though the Gaithers may want to rest on the laurels of Bill and Gloria’s early work if this latest material is to be the kind of songwriting we are to expect of the great name in its patriarch’s sunset years (”Forgiven Again” is not an aberration; B&G wrote a perfect imitation of themselves from 20 years ago on Greater Vision’s latest project).

I realize I run the risk of overusing a term of my own coinage, but my hunch is that this is all yet another effect of Gaitherization: EHSSQ became wildly popular very quickly primarily on the basis of their live Homecoming performances. Consequently, EHSSQ’s brand has become disproportionately mortgaged to the group’s stage presence, to theatrics (which I don’t mean pejoratively) joined with genuine vocal ability and stylistic flare in live settings. One symptom of this otherwise glorious ascent is that unless you count their Christmas project (some do; I don’t), there is no real benchmark EHSSQ project out there - though this project plunges to a depth that in a side-by-side comparison makes Great Love look and sound like a towering achievement even though it’s not (it’s good; not great).

It’s as if Gaitherization has caused Haase to learn (and remind us he’s learned) the lesson of George Younce’s stage craft so well he forgot to pay attention to the other factors that contribute to the kind of balanced brand that is sustainable across segments and audiences and in different (read “not live”) settings. On stage, the kind of Truman Show bubbliness that plagues this project is just fine, but that’s because on-stage schmaltz is leavened with the full complement of a live performer’s basket of goodies: visuals (like dancing and being generally young and beautiful), live instrumentation, interaction with the audience, song set-up and transitions, and the general process of introducing personalities to audiences through comedy and other set pieces.

But if we are to judge by this project, the studio messes with EHSSQ’s mojo. Nobody but the engineers and Lari Goss to see their dance moves. Nobody to marvel at the careful carelessness of their bedhead. No guaranteed laugh track in response to Roy Webb’s bon mots (he is funny). The result is 45 minutes or so of a recording that shimmers in its artificiality.

The clever way to say this might be that the second S in EHSSQ is there, but not the first (ok, so that’s cute, but not so much clever). It’s not that the thing isn’t lively. There’s all manner of enthusiasm on this project - in fact that’s part of what annoys me about it: you can almost see these guys singing every note, even the melancholy and dark ones, with big cheese-eating grins on their faces. In musical terms this means the material needed to have more stylistic inflection from the individual vocalists to give the project some shape and individuality (and the arrangements needed to sound less like they were meant for our easy-listening pleasure whilst nestled in a beige leather couch with a stoneware mug of café latte at a Starbucks somewhere in suburbia). But that’s just a fancy way of saying that while the project is lively; it’s not at all alive.

Unless EHSSQ figures out a way of translating the energy and personality of their stagecraft into the studio with them, a group leveraged so heavily to embodying fads and trendiness on stage better hope that whatever The Next Big Thing is in their act, it manages to be as popular and dazzling as their little Baptist dance moves, short ties, and spikey hair - popular enough, that is, so that people will buy pretty much anything they crank out, even if it misfires as badly as this project does. Because if they let the act onstage go slack for even a moment, projects like this one will be hard ground to fall back on.

As he ages, Haase has a good chance of filling the role of patriarch (or “old man,” whichever you prefer) surrounded by young lads (the age gap making available a whole stable of jokes that, one can only hope, are not purely recycled material from George and Glen’s days). This is so not least of all because, as George Younce’s health declines and prevents public appearances, Haase being Younce’s son-in-law makes Haase the world’s public connection to George - talking about George was the point of the Gaither interview on Homecoming radio. But for now, the SSQ image is decidedly one of cultivated youth, and not only is “patriarch” or “old man” the last thing one think to call Ernie Haase, which seems to be intentional, but it’s also difficult to imagine him in that role. It’ll be worth watching to see how the Gaither connection helps shape the next phase of SSQ. Already, I’ve noticed from a lot of the pictures posted on various websites from their shows these days, SSQ hasn’t always appeared in matching suits and generally looks more aesthetically subdued, channeling (one would presume) the energy conveyed through hair, makeup and flashy clothes through the music itself (and yes, I know, SSQ has always mixed it up between matching suits and not, but my point is that in the pics I’ve found of the non-matching suit mode, they look more grown up and professional). This is not, as far as I can tell, a bad plan at all, since they seem to be lighting a fire everywhere they go these days. Which is to say: It gets harder and harder to pull off the Dawson’s-Creek-Goes-to-Prom look when you’re … well, not a kid anymore, and it’s a lot easier to be the group that sings like a house afire (as opposed to the guys who dance like a bunch of boys) when you’re old.