At NQC in 1995, the Gaither Vocal Band was selling limited time pre-release editions of its Southern Classics, Vol. 2, Guy Penrod’s debut recording with the group. His big song on the album was “Count on Me,” a testimonial anthem with a fireworks climax built around Penrod’s gigantic range. On the version of the album sold at NQC, Penrod owned the song, start to finish, and it was magnificent. I can still recall huddling in the car outside the Louisville Airport Holiday Inn with friends listening to that track over and over. I think I may have shouted just a little the first time I heard the sound sample of a distant crowd roaring that’s looped into the track just before Penrod’s entrance on that transcendent second verse. Certainly I giggled deliriously. It was like hearing the cheering of a thousand me’s hardwired right into the song.

But on the album that went to retailers a few months later, Gaither himself took the first verse from Penrod, whose voice didn’t appear until after the first chorus. And thus did a great song become merely a really good one.

I was reminded of this story listening to the Nelons’ new project. Here’s a group with Kelly Nelon Clark, one of the most recognized names and beloved and capable voices in gospel music, joined now with the mature and increasingly gifted contributions of her oldest daughter, Amber. And yet over and over we’re left as listeners to wonder what song after song might have sounded like if, you know, the most talented members of the group had actually been featured.

Which is to say, Beside Still Waters might have more accurately been called The Jason Clark Show. Track 2, track 4 and 5 and 7 and 8 and 10 … by a rough estimation, at least half the album has Clark taking solos or commanding the lead the vocals on songs. While Jason Clark is no Bill Gaither vocally, he’s never been the star of the Nelons’ show on stage or in the studio. It would be nice if someone informed him of this fact. Perhaps his wife?

This dynamic will be no surprise if you’ve followed the Nelons since Clark assumed a greater role in the group. The difference is that up till now the group was basically Kelly and Her Backup Singers, at least as far vocal ability is concerned. But whereas the Nelons’ vocal talent had been lopsidedly tilted toward Kelly Nelon Clark, Beside Still Waters makes it clear that Amber Nelon Thompson has now come of age vocally.

There’s a certain pastiche quality to the sound of her solo voice, which clearly bears the trace influences of Miley and Taylor and Martina and Faith. But this hardly matters in the ensemble, which she and her mother and Clark transform into heavenly harmony. Joined to Wayne Haun’s superb orchestration, the sound of the album positively sparkles on a regular basis.

Unfortunately the song selection fails to live up to the album’s sonic quality. Far too many of the tunes here are melodically turgid and lyrically formulaic (“love’s embrace” rhymes with “fears erased” and “cross of calvaRY” rhymes with “love of God for ME”). Up to a point, insightful or sufficiently hookey lyrics can salvage dead-end melodies, and original melodic lines and creative harmonies can redeem flaccid lyrics. But songs that are lyrically and melodically weak – and often sung at a funereal pace, as is the case here with “Love of God,” “Weep,” and “I Choose to Live” – tend to sully and muddle the album with too many emotionally pensive episodes of dour spiritual weather.

The amateurish songwriting was my complaint about the Nelons’ last southern gospel album, The Light of Home, and to be sure the problem is not as bad here. Beside Still Waters includes a couple of upbeat numbers that stand out on the album not least because they foreground the Nelons’ harmony, including “He Found Me” and “Goodbye Valley, Hello Mountaintop,” perhaps the project’s most lyrically innovative song. “Consider Me,” a mid-tempo soother with a swaying sensibility, also falls into the group of “heavenly harmony” songs, with the added bonus of being built around a memorable lyrical concept (though the phrase “consider me a Jesus fan” is cringe-inducingly  church-campy). And “Jesus What a Wonderful Name” has an expansive sweep to the vocals and orchestration that demonstrate one way of spinning lyrical straw into … well, if not a quite a golden song, then at least gold plated.

But my favorite tune on the album has got to be the cover of Carroll McGruder’s foot-stomping old song, “I’m Going Home with Jesus.” In fact, it’s the one song I most wished I could hear, ala “Count on Me,” with the group’s stronger vocalist given the lead throughout. Here’s hoping Kelly Nelon Clark and Amber take turns taking command of the song live, which ought to absolutely knock the tops of their heads off.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that most of us will ever find out, unless you have a chance to hear them in concert as part of their fairly limited touring schedule. That’s because so far, the Nelons aren’t scheduled on the NQC mainstage. Sarah Palin is a NQC featured speaker, but you’ll have to sit through the Proclaimers, New Ground, and the Browns to hear a few precious minutes of the Nelons in the East Hall during prime cocktail nap time on Friday afternoon. Alrighty then.

I have no desire to relitigate the dead-end debate about the indecipherable process by which artists are and are not selected for mainstage appearances. NQC owners have a right to give and withhold mainstage slots to whomever they wish. But it speaks powerfully to the degenerative state of the southern gospel industry’s vision of itself that the former half-term governor of Alaska can get top billing at southern gospel’s flagship music event, but the Nelons - an act that actually sings gospel music - don’t even rate twenty minutes on the evening concert lineup.

We may never know for sure why this sort of thing happens (the profit motive only goes so far as an explanatory framework), but the vagaries and mysteriousness of the process don’t make many of its outcomes any less outrageous or discrediting.

So until or unless NQC changes its mind, Nelons fan will have to make do with Beside Still Waters.

The first line of the first song, “Somebody Like Me,” on Jason Crabb’s new album says a lot about his debut solo album:

The congregation parted like the Red Sea,
When that old drunk stumbled in down the aisle
And took a seat, right in the middle of Amazing Grace

It suffers alone in print (for one thing, it comes off as triter than it sounds when sung), but the lyric captures the album’s general tendency to take familiar tropes and idioms of gospel music and torque the frame, distort the focus just a bit, skew the point of view so that that even as you’re investing emotionally in music that sounds reassuringly familiar, the song is busy undercutting the basis for that investment bit by marvelous, lyrical bit.

In the case of “Somebody Like Me,” the title has already prepared us to expect that, like a thousand tear-in-my-beer-for-Jesus tunes, the old drunk in the first verse will turn out to be a cipher for more ordinary spiritual struggles of the sort familiar to “somebody like me.” But something happens on the way to the Baptism of Jesse Taylor. 

You can listen to the song for yourself (thanks to a “listening party” going on over GospelMusicUpdate; btw, notice how giving something away online like this is likely to drive substantial sales of the album). But it won’t spoil anything to point out that those opening lines hint at the shift in perspective that’s key to the song’s hook: this repulsive drunk is no descendant of ole Jesse, everybody’s favorite alcoholic delivered from the drink, and there won’t be any beatific baptism here.

Nor is this album just a typical countrified collection of Christian crooning by an erstwhile front man of a defunct family act. It may be all that, but it’s also full of first-rate songwriting and singing of the sort rarely found in gospel music today.

Given the Crabb reputation for staging music with sharp hooks and trenchant tunes, you may think you know what I mean. And yes, there are Gerald Crabb lyrics here (including a rearranged “Through the Fire” that sounds like it went to the Middle East – or maybe just Paula Stefanovich’s house – and picked up a Persian leitmotif since it was last among us). But you’ve never heard Crabb Family music quite like this.

As befits a solo project, the album emphasizes songs about the ever-moving dawn of spiritual striving that preoccupies the individual religious life. Here’s the opening of “Hope for me Yet”:

I could bless the water
But it wouldn’t turn to wine
Paint a picture of a sunset
Hanging there in your eyes
But it’d be just some compromise.
I could write a million verses
Of words you’ve heard before
Steal some of Dylan’s best but it’d
Leave me wanting to say more

Purists will doubtless object to the song’s equivalence of romantic love in the first verse with the experience of Christian salvation in the second. But tell me, dear readers. When’s the last time a gospel song rhymed “your eyes” and “compromise” and made such a graceful (or any!) reference to Dylan lyrics? While you think, I’ll continue to giggle gleefully.

The album is full of this sort of vivid, deft imagery, like these lines, from “Sometimes I Cry.”

I look the part, blend in with the rest of the church crowd
I know the routine, I could list all the bible studies in town.
Watch Christian TV, I know all the preachers, their clichés
I been born again, and without a doubt I know I’m saved.

Hearing lines like this from a guy who regularly appears on Christian TV alongside  the people whose names and faces show up in the lexicon of modern evangelicalism next to “tv preachers and clichés,” I don’t know whether this is self-parody or a plea for dispensation. And I can’t tell how much we’re supposed to hear the use of stock phrases like “born again” and “without a doubt” and “I know I’m saved” in that last line as a parody of preacherly cliches spewing from the tv.

But it all makes for marvelous music. “Sometimes,” Crabb confesses with that achey twinge of tears and self-embattlement in his voice during the chorus, “I fall down, stumble over my own disguise.” Dear Lord, who doesn’t.

The album is not all written this well. The second verses of both “Hope for me Yet” and “Sometimes I Cry” are substantially weaker than the first (something about “Sometimes” feels like it was originally conceived as a straight-ahead country tune and then revised for a cut on a gospel album). But that’s rather like complaining that people only ever remember the first verse of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Spring Hill is clearly positioning this project as a country album, but it’s no more or less country (the marvelous “One Day at a Time” or “Walk on Water,” whose intro sounds remarkably like the melodic hook to “Whispered Prayer”) than it is also at times very southern (“Worth it All”), inspo (“Forever’s End”), and CCM (“No Love Lost” or “I Will Love You”).

In fact, the most obviously country tune, “Ellsworth” (about a family matriarch sliding into dementia after the death of her dear husband), is probably also the singly weakest tune on the album. The song will be immediately recognizable to contemporary country fans as a family-and-nostalgia number, but that’s the problem: like so many off the rack country ballads, it’s all sentiment with little of substance to elevate the song out of its emotional self-indulgence. Fortunately, the tune is an exception.

It’ll be too bad if southern gospel diehards spend a lot of energy fighting about whether or not to claim this album, because this is precisely the kind of work that suggests a way out of the wilderness for southern gospel: well-written, curious, warmblooded songs, arranged with originality, imagination and exquisite attention to detail, sung with the care of a craftsman … and infused with the lived experience of a spiritual struggler.

There are all sorts of reasons to call this Crabb’s Country Solo Album. But the truth is, its style is unclassifiable (I suspect Crabb is constantly labeled as “country” more because of his twangy vocal style than anything about the types of songs he sings).

Anyway, what you call it is hardly the point. What matters is the album’s masterful example of the very best pan-southern sensibility that’s at the heart of all good gospel music.

HisSong is typical of many hard-working groups on the fringes of the industry who can sing for years and burn through several short-lived careers, all the while teetering between obscurity and breaking through. On the Way Up is the group’s third album (or fourth, depending how you feel about albums that are solely covers of old tunes), and besides being borrowed from a fantastic old Hemphills song – more about that in a bit – the album title aptly captures the aspirational quality of project.

Anchored by three older tunes (the title track and one other Hemphills’ song, “The Miracle Man,” and “Joy in my Heart”), the album comprises mostly new material orchestrated and arranged with the kind of glittering expertise that in most other genres is reserved for only upper-echelon acts. The result – if you close your eyes and listen imaginatively – is a dispatch from some potential future moment when a successful HisSong has landed their Gaither Music record deal and out Wolfed Greater Vision for most beloved male trio. At least this scenario helps the NQC-sized orchestrations on the album feel more contextually appropriate.

I recommend attempting this feat of imagination while listening over and over to the title track, “On the Way Up,” which I confess is pretty much the main reason I decided to review the album in the first place. The Hemphills recorded the song on their Without a Doubt album from 1876 1976. As it’s covered here, it’s not the only good song on the album, but it’s easily the best. Refurbished with a black gospel gait that’s helped along with some R&B moves here and there and held together by the understated distinction of pianist Virgil Stratton’s work at the keyboards, the song exemplifies the way to pay homage to a great old song, while also making it wholly your own.

Partly, the song’s success emerges from an admirable vocal discipline, which helps define this and other solid, if not outstanding, songs, such as “The Grave Can’t Hole Hold Me” and “I Don’t Regret.” As for “On the Way Up,” this discipline keeps the group from oversinging. Instead of giving in to the centrifugal pull of the black gospel style – there’s always the temptation for southern gospel singers to want to Kirk-Franklin all over the last quarter of these songs – the harmony stays focuses and gains texture as the song gains momentum. Instead of speeding up the tempo or launching the voices off into their own orbits, the arrangement builds intensity by complicating and enriching the passing tones. Slide into a chord here, lean on a note slightly harder over there … the vocal discipline allows less is to be so much more.

But the real show-stealer here (and elsewhere) is the tenor part, sung by Adam Eldrod (thanks, SS). It’s not the kind of voice I’m sure I’d want to hear for prolonged periods of time. Indeed at his weakest, Elrod seems so enamored with the distinctive vocal sounds he can produce that he forgets to sing his lines with consistent comprehensibility (he especially needs to be careful to close his vowels and sharpen his phrases so that they are less about tone painting and more about clearly communicating complete musical ideas). But that said, Elrod sees and attempts to do something other and else with the high parts than typical gospel tenors. It’s a different voice, mostly in a good way, very human, self-possessed and experimental, as far as southern gospel is concerned. Exhausted as I am by the high, thin, tinny and coldblooded sound that so many tenors strive for, Elrod’s voice has the potential to distinguish itself in the manner of Jeff Crews’, formerly of Paid in Full, or Rick Strickland’s, in his prime.

It doesn’t hurt that Elrod and the rest of the group have an excellent vehicle in a Joel Hemphill tune. I don’t know why Hemphill’s songs aren’t re-covered more than they are, but that just makes it all the more joy to find “The Miracle Man” on here as well. It’s not nearly as strongly done as “On the Way Up,” but the album deserves points for featuring two old, less-remembered, but by no means lesser, Hemphills tunes.

Much of the rest of the album gets carried along by the force of the production quality. So good, in fact, that at times it tends to accentuate the distance between the group’s ability and that of their producer. “Because of the Blood” is the obligatory power-house B-3 gospel crooner tune. I’m a sucker for these songs, so the predictable lyrics don’t bother me that much, since the fun of these numbers is not the freshness of the writing but listening to how a particular ensemble puts its mark on a standard subspecies of the genre.

What did lift a butt-check off the chair, though, was the baritone’s pitchy entrance, the way he seemed to be trying to sing the way he thought someone should sound for this kind of song – all melisma and chewy syllables. And then there’s the mumbly delivery on “The Things That Won’t Be There,” a song with the same kind of rapid-fire phrasing of “I Wish I Coulda Been There.” The verses need to pop more, and the ensemble as a whole needs to go back and listen to how the Perrys deployed the use of staccato to sing their way through “I Wish.” As it is, the vocals feel like they’re being dragged along by the band track, and slurred lines give the impression of rhythmic ineptitude and amateurism.

The baritone (and lead) deserves credit for not trying to sing out of his range, but too often, he seems to be covering up his trouble with tone placement by going breathy. This is especially the case with “Out of His Way,” which has the added misfortune of being lyrically formulaic, conceptually predictable, and unnecessarily draggy. Like a few other songs here – “Through Every Storm” particularly comes to mind, with its telegraphed reliance on meteorological metaphors and an overdone ending that tries to compensate for the rest of the song’s weakness – the song feels like something an A-list writer pulled out of the back of the drawer for a C-list group (there’s probably a joke here about not going out of your way to listen to this song, but I’d have to listen to the song again to figure it out).

The lead voice is slightly stronger, but lacks definition and authority. But my point isn’t to pick on the guys individually. The point is, HisSong really is a good example of the old line about the sum of their parts etc. The album is not exactly diverse in its song styles, but there’s good variety here, such as “Our Highest Praise,” an easy listening tune that struck me as a good contender for a sitcom theme song, which I don’t mean entirely pejoratively. It’s catchy, harmonically sophisticated and confident, and nicely paced. All the way to this end of the spectrum and back again to the solid, traditional center of “Joy In My Heart,” the group maintains a pleasant, sometimes even impressive ensemble sound.

You may have heard “I Still Have it All” on the radio, which is a fine enough song, as midtempo songs of reassurance go. It gives the tenor solid exposure while also showcasing the ensemble’s harmonic strength (completely an aside: but don’t the entrances to the verses sound almost exactly like the entrances to the verses for “Four Days Late”?). Except, there’s the super-strong “On the Way Up” sitting at the top of album just waiting to endear the group to nostalgia-loving sg audiences everywhere. Added bonus! It’s a fantastic tune. With luck, it’ll be the group’s next single off the project. And even if it isn’t, we can still close our eyes and imagine.

Whitmire’s cd of old-timey gospel standards has been in my car for the past however many weeks (months?) since Mark Lowry was in town, and it’s captivated me, even though finally it leaves me disappointed (more on that in a moment). As you might recall from a while back, I’ve been looking for some straightahead get-along, well-played solo piano that instead of relying on ginned up orchestral majesty taps into the deeply satisfying rhythms and memorable melodies and happy harmonies of those old songs. To access the best parts of gospel music on the solo piano, it takes the patience of the singularly focused player undistracted by back-up.

Whitmire’s may not be exactly that album, but it’s the closest thing I’ve found. To begin with, Whitmire’s technical facility at the keyboard is as nearly flawless as it comes. If he didn’t play this way in public, you’d think it was a confection of studio overdubbing. As it is, the runs and fills and arpeggiated phrases pop out at you with the kind of careful articulation (and authenticity) typically reserved for classical players. It sometimes seems as though Whitmire is a symphony unto himself.

Few people in gospel music can play this well this reliably, which is why, of course, so many fall back on the string cheese of synthesized symphonies and orchestral back-ups to cover for them when they record a solo project. To be good, solo gospel piano, especially the old stuff, has to manage to convey the vocal richness and complexity of four-part close harmony while also not losing the unique accompaniment style that defines the southern gospel player: it’s about the light touch of bridging vocal phrases when people are singing, but it’s also about jumping out into the limelight between verses or during turnarounds to quickly and evocatively establish a melody or leading theme or key change. The latter part most gospel pianists have down cold. But conveying the vocal style of gospel harmonics requires more than just tone painting, though it requires that too. It’s a matter of using careful shifts in registers, pacing, and emphasis to suggest where the harmonic or melodic center of the song would be if it were being sung. Sounds easy maybe, but remember: there are four voices in a quartet but only two hands to your average pianist.

Whitmire is strongest when he sticks closest to the unadorned convention and quartet styles: “I’m Winging My Way,” “I’ve Got that Old Time Religion” (minus the contrived and hokey bar-room and Rockettes ending), and “Do Right and Come Smiling Through” — all songs that succeed by effectively avoiding the slide into excessive ragtime or bluesy flavoring that muddy things up stylistically in almost all the other cases.

But those three songs are enough for me. They capture the effusive pull of the church-lady strides and the head-thrown-back boomchuck exuberance long associated with the best gospel players. In addition to this, though, Whitmire has brought to these songs the eyes and ears of a musical theoretician. He doesn’t do anything that wouldn’t have necessarily been beyond Eva Mae or Rosa Nell or Tommy Fairchild or other masters of the style in their prime. But Whitmire consciously weaves into these arrangements subtleties of structure and thematic figures in a way that foregrounds not just the tunefulness of southern gospel but its musical sophistication as well. In so doing, he reminds us that we diminish ourselves and the gospel tradition to mistake its simple beauties for aesthetic simplism. As it turns out, those old masters only made it look easy.

My biggest complaint is that the album tries too hard too much of the time. In striving to faithfully capture the vocal intensity of the southern gospel style, Whitmire’s arrangements achieve harmonic verisimilitude at the expense of listenability (though to be fair, this is a critique that could be made of a lot of southern gospel singers and groups). Too many of the songs contain so much fancy-fingered filigree that they create a claustrophobic, mildly oppressive atmosphere. Nary a beat of breathing space is left anywhere in any song. What white space there is (usually near the beginning of songs) quickly gets smothered by dazzling but dizzying displays of virtuosity. “Goodbye World, Goodbye” is illustrative of what I mean: playing all the vocal parts AND providing fantastically arabesque fills between virtually every vocal phrases may technically capture the song’s frenetic style, but by the end of this and many other songs, you’re left with a suffocating feeling, the desire for someone to open a window or something.

Sometimes it’s the notes you don’t play, and I’m sure an accomplished player such as Whitmire knows this. But that only makes for more disappointment (which is why even or especially people who can arrange their own stuff this well should always collaborate with someone of equal or greater ability). What keeps this good album from being great is not the absence of brilliance but an embarrassment of riches – such an overabundance of ability and insight into the pleasures of the gospel piano that nothing is omitted … and all the oxygen gets sucked out of the room.

PS: I didn’t see David Bruce Murray’s inclusion of Whitmire in his underrated geniuses category until after I posted this, and/but obviously I’d second that emotion.

Update: Let me clarify what I say above about Whitmire not doing anything on this album that some of the old timers couldn’t do: My point was not to suggest (though I inadvertently did, I realize) that Whitmire is no better than your average great sg pianist. In fact, he is, as far as I can tell, probably single most talented player to work in the form. But on this particular project there isn’t anything here that necessarily stands out as clearly beyond the ability of some of the best who’ve been on stage (though of course feel free to disagree with me). On this album, Whitmire seems to be focusing on certain skill sets that are more in line with what an Eva Mae or Rosa Nell et al might have done if they had really pushed themselves. Which makes sense, given the title of the album. Now, whether they have actually played that well before is another question. What isn’t in question though, as far as I’m concerned, is that Whitmire is a superior player in general. I’m sure there are albums out there that bear this out, as David Bruce Murray suggests. But in this case, I was only speaking of the Old Time project. Anyway, I probably could (and definitely should) have been clearer.

Later (related) update: For what it’s worth, reader DA has posted this clip of Eva Mae and the LeFevres on youtube. Idn’t grand?

The Collingsworth Family
God is Faithful
P&KC Music
2005
ALI: 40%

Looking at the cover of the Collingsworth Family’s 2005 album, God is Faithful, the unironic wholesomeness wafts off the cd in gusts. After a while, you can almost begin to smell the homemade cookies and Sunday pot roast, practically feel little Olivia’s hand reach out and grasp yours in an unconditional welcome to join the family as they sit down to give thanks at a dinner scene that later this year they will send out as Christmas postcards.

A big helping of family goodness shouldn’t be all that surprising to find at the center of a southern gospel act, and yet the Collingsworth family’s shine is so glossy, their happiness apparently so undiluted and earnest, it almost makes Connie Hopper look like a phony by comparison.

I think this is because the Collingworths have managed to successfully package their wholesomeness for the market (right down to the “Hair and wardrobe design by Kim Collingsworth,” as the liner notes put it) while betraying very little of the contrivance and strategy and entrepreneurial cunning such successful marketing requires – it’s the difference between, say, Janet Paschal and Jan Crouch. Unlike other gospel music families who have capitalized on their homespun bonafides by playing up their rough edges and unpolished style (the Goodmans) or keeping the country but gussying it up via the Gap and Express (the Crabbs), the Collingsworths invite you to vicariously enjoy the harmony of one big happy, impeccably manicured, respectably attired clan who wakes up every morning ready to conquer the world for Christ in song – notice how often the family’s press photos are shot with some kind of urban (or urbane) backdrop – but without ever becoming part of that world (be ye not of … etc).

As trendsetters, the family’s sound and style are important for the way they implicitly critique the rank amateurism and hilarious garishness that afflict the majority of family acts and TBN moneychangers trying to break through in evangelical entertainment these days. Indeed, in their contrast to the prevailing trend, the Collingsworths suggest – and lo, a miracle, this – that slathered-on makeup, sine-wave vibrato, bad hairpieces, bejeweled stage props and instruments, cheap suits, DIY dye jobs, diphthongy oversinging, and gold lame anything might actually be unchristian after all, or at least works of so many false, gaudy prophets.

The Collingsworth family is largeish, numerically anyway (Kim, Phil and four kids all young enough that their voices aren’t easily distinguishable from one another), bringing to mind Brock Speer’s line about the whole fam damily. The myriad combinations that can be made from six different voices gives the album the feel of a variety show … Indeed, I had to follow along with the liner notes the first few times I listened to the album to keep straight who was singing what and when and with whom. Not surprisingly, some of the acts (especially the ladies trio and the Phil-Kim-Brooklyn combo) are more successful than others (the daughters’ solos - children’s music may work on the stage but doesn’t make for riveting records - and, with my flak jacket on and the promise to explain myself more in a moment, Kim’s piano solos). But even while I only care to listen to about half the cuts on return visits to the album, there’s a buoyancy to the family’s sound in all its iterations that’s impossible not to find endearing.

My favorite cut on the album is “Tradin’ A Cross for a Crown.” It’s one of the few songs (along with “We Want to Praise the Lord” and “Shine on Us”) with the full family ensemble, and as I sit here typing with the family’s tightly-knit yet delightfully expansive harmonies pouring from the speakers beside my desk, I’m smiling irrepressibly. The chorus is a picture of musical poise: the perfectly clipped and neatly trimmed phrases balanced against wide open intonations (“I’m notuh / gonna walk awwwayyyy, I’ve gotuh / too much at staayyke”) create a deeply pleasing symmetry sung with the kind of enviably easy blend that only comes from shared genetics.

This must be infectious stuff to hear live (assuming they pull off this kind of spectacularly tuneful sound onstage): six family members holding forth so naturally and expressively. And it’s not the novelty of it all (though it IS a novel act, which will become harder to sustain as these kids age, I suspect … wholesome is difficult to keep going when rosy cheeks turn pimply and hormonal). It’s the ear they all have – cultivated and trained, to some extent, but self-evidently full of natural giftedness – for matching each other note for note, tone for tone, and for contouring their phrasing perfectly … attacking a phrase, truncating a syllable, coordinating syncopations, bending a vowel just enough to leave their inimitable imprint on it. Listen to how they arc the intonations of the word “healer” in “The Healer is Here.” With just the right amount of torque, the “er” sound morphs phonetically unto an “ahhh” that lets them enrich and expand the resonance of the tone, and so, suggest the very experience of the healer’s arrival.

Or “Shine on Us:” across the phrases in the chorus “find a way, in the darkest night” and “let your light shine on us,” the harmonics first expand, the chorus climaxing around the minor sixth of “the darkest night,” then collapse back into the lower, more reassuring registers in which to “let your light shine on us.” It’s so subtly sung that dissection cheapens its effect, not least of all because the Collingsworth sound owes a great deal to the vague but persistent feeling that the kind of music-theory scrutiny to which I’ve just submitted their songs is the farthest thing from their mind (whether or not this is true, I haven’t the faintest idea; it’s the perception I want to emphasize).

And this leads me to one of two complaints I have about God is Faithful. The Collingsworths’ voices are so naturally commanding and artlessly enthralling that the album often feels overproduced, with its swelling strings and maximally orchestrated scores and sky-high bgvs. Then again at other times, especially “Light from Heaven,” the family’s voices are oddly flaccid and disconnected from the song thematically, as if they’re relying too much on the orchestration to get the job done (vocally the song is all light without any of the darker colorations that Kim Lord’s voice gave the song when the Ruppes originally cut it, those dark tones essential in bringing into relief the illuminating power of divine light). I can fully appreciate wanting to take ample advantage of producers and arrangers of Roger Talley’s and Wayne Haun’s eminence and create an album that proves its seriousness by dint of symphonic majesty. But the lavishness of the orchestration at times feels stylistically incongruous with the Collingsworths’ sound – like Leonard Bernstein scoring the music for an episode of Seventh Heaven.

The Collingsworths’ voices can carry a sustained ending or rousing chorus all on their own, in their own way. They don’t need so much of the strings stringing and harps harping and the percussion section percussing and an oddly star-studded “appears courtesy of” chorus of bgvs (Jim Brady, Charlotte Ritchie and Lauren Frikkin Talley!) wailing away behind them. I’m not sure this is lily gilding exactly, but it comes awfully close.

My other issue is not so much a complaint as a disappointment: the piano solos. I admit I’m coming late to the Collingsworth party, which means I’ve listened to praises for Kim Collingsworth’s abilities at the piano for so long that my expectations couldn’t help but ascend to a level of the stratosphere to which no human could possibility rise. Still, even subtracting the hype, it was a big disappointment (though not, alas, a surprise) to find the gifts of this considerably talented keyboard artist obscured by all the clunky furniture of middle-brow piano soloism: the schmaltzy instrumentation and the cheesy ooooo-ing and ahhhhh-ing of the bgvs. All that was missing was a candelabra and one of Joanna Castle’s feather boas.

It’s not just that dense runs and tricky arpeggiations (see especially “Swingin’ and Marchin”) are far less impressive with a full band track keeping time and a host of bgvs establishing the melody behind the piano. More than that is the tired fact that absolutely everybody (in sg anyway) does it: from Dino to Roy Webb. Perhaps Collingsworth wanted to prove she could hold her own at what is an overwhelmingly male domain. But as the old music-school saying goes, the best notes are often the ones you don’t play, and this is especially true if the guys are busy measuring each other’s abilities by the size of their 32^nd-note runs. Think less Andrew Ishee a la “The Prayer” and more Roger Bennett, a la Midnight Meditations.

It’s a lesson that might serve to guide the family’s sound as a whole: trust yourselves a bit more, and the bells and whistles of the producer’s booth a bit less. Because for however long the Collingsworths can keep this beatific sound together, the blandishments of the symphonic strings, the clanging cymbal, and the “appears courtesy of” will compete with even their best efforts to capture the sound of the unbroken family circle. I don’t guess the two are mutually exclusive. But listening to a song like “Free to Go Home,” the album’s final cut, it’s the voices I want to hear more of – less of the variety show novelty act and more of those wonderful but far-too-scarce moments when the song breaks free vocally from the apparatus of production, and in the process recreates a little of what it might have sounded like to stumble into some backwoods Nazarene church and discover this family for the first time, their voices knocking the roof off with every marvelous measure and magical phrase.

From her very early days with the Rex Nelon Singers, Janet Paschal’s career has been defined by stylistic dexterity: after her stint in southern gospel, she branched out into 1980s inspirational anthems as a soloist for televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, a style that morphed during her time on the Bill Gaither Homecoming Friends tour into a pleasant blend of old and new. This kind of professional itinerancy could undo less self-possessed performers, reducing them to a confusing smash-up of competing identities. But Paschal always seemed perfectly at home in all these places without ever becoming narrowly identified with any one of them.

Sounds Like Sunday is Paschal’s first new release since her successful fight against breast cancer over the past two years, and perhaps not surprisingly the album finds her in a spiritually contemplative state of mind that moves her musically beyond the limiting boundaries of any single genre or tradition. She has written recently of her hope that this recording will help “grant us a new perspective on why we’re here at all.” And the twelve hymns collected here have the distinct feel of a sometimes rapturous, sometimes solemn celebration of faith and life, commemorating songs of assurance, hope, and mercy that might speak powerfully to someone who has endured illness and survived recovery as Paschal has (a portion of album sales will benefit the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation).

But just beneath the surface, this album also suggests that the work of suffering can go well beyond the commemorative and the testimonial. Where a less careful album of hymns could easily turn into a reliquary of dutiful church-lady specials, Sounds Like Sunday develops a delightfully diverse mix of sounds and styles, reimagining the relevance of the hymnody itself as an art form and a mode of religious experience. The richly imaginative arrangements here not only rediscover the power of hymns to sustain and relieve, but reestablish these classic songs as living texts of religious necessity.

In “Surely God is Able,” the relaxed but playful black-gospel score lets the lyrics speak for themselves and, using long passages that ride the one of the chord, situates our ordinary trials and tribulations in a divine history of saints suffering for the glory of God. What keeps this old standard from turning trite or cliché is Paschal’s slightly sassy way of describing all the harrowing situations in which God is able to work – backed up by a chorus of commiserating voices who seem to respond empathetically to her with variations on the same theme: “mmm huh … that’s right!” “The Good Lord Works in Mysterious Ways” acts as a call-and-response companion to “Surely,” ending with a long outburst of declarative pathos that turns the song’s title into a lament as much as a promise. These songs reassert God’s faithfulness to carry us through in his time and reaffirm the wondrousness of his mysterious ways, but they also suggest (somewhat surreptitiously) that you don’t always have to like his timing or methods.

I don’t know if this is what Paschal had in mind when she wrote of wanting to “give the theology [of these songs] entry into our everyday thinking.” But Paschal’s voice and Haun’s arrangements have convincingly captured the way truly inspirational periods of meditation and reflection draw us at first backward, to the stabilizing familiarity of old traditions – “What a Friend we Have in Jesus” and “I See a Crimson Stream” rely on a rustic, old-country acoustical sound to evoke the assurances of simple faith believing (though “What a Friend” is paced a bit slow perhaps) – but ultimately push us beyond the past, and toward a new sense of spiritual things that resonates with our changed circumstances.

If we are to understand these songs as a testament to the power of faith and art in times of struggle, then it is a faith and an art that for Paschal reinvigorate as they sustain, inspiring a eclectic virtuosity that runs the gamut from an Ella-Fitzgerald inspired arrangement of “Let the Lower Lights be Burning” – Paschal’s voice poised perfectly, a la Ella, just a half-click ahead of the beat, backed up by supporting vocals right out of the Savoy Ballroom – to the towering grandeur of “Be Still My Soul,” with a big brassy score and an operatic chorus that seem almost to summon a heavenly host.

Paschal inhabits a playbill full of roles flawlessly: at one end there’s the billowy voiced enchantress of “When God Dips his Love in my Heart,” with its patient shuffling gait and longsuffering electric piano; at the other extreme, the high-church celebrant of “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” its stately pipe organ and sacred chorus transporting Paschal (and us) to the reverence of a gothic cathedral, the beauty of a stained-glass frieze.

Which is to say, Sounds like Sunday is impressionistic, moving between and among genres fluidly, borrowing and absorbing styles as diverse as the sounds of the Sabbath itself. But the conventional Sunday worship experience rarely sounds this sweet. Even a song like “Near the Cross,” that feels closest to the piano-and-voices style many of us associate with Sunday morning, manages to be both less self-conscious and more immediate than even the best church music. Pared down to just keyboard (played so well it’s worth listening to the track for the piano alone), bass guitar, and a few background vocals, the song captures the vitality of those rare unrehearsed moments when old and musically gifted friends find themselves in what the scripture so quaintly called one accord – a commingling of sympathy and spirit brought together around a piano by the bond of a familiar hymn and a sharing of the soul’s deepest satisfaction in the consolation of music.

“The Savior is Waiting” and “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” are similarly intimate but their more elaborate orchestration give the songs the elegance of a vocal-jazz set in a tucked-away corner of a lower east side Italian bistro that somehow found salvation.

Over and over, these songs evoke their own self-contained universe in imagination. The raw power of a symphony, the spiritual intimacy of the altar call, the dramatic arc of a Broadway musical, the enveloping charisma of the diva’s one-woman show: Just Janet.

Indeed, in its magisterial sweep – from the meditative and reflective to the stylistically curious and playful (listen for that little giggle at the end of “When God Dips his Love”) - Sounds Like Sunday possesses a larger-than-life feeling that cries out to be staged live. And I don’t mean Paschal singing along with digital accompaniment tracks. I mean live on stage like a redeemed Barbara Cook (the grand dame of Broadway) at the Christian Carnegie Hall with a full complement of players and backing vocals (listen to the symphonic opening to “Be Still My Soul” and tell me that wouldn’t be electrifying to experience with a live orchestra delivering the introductory bars like an operatic overture and then a spotlight suddenly illuminating Paschal centerstage). Paschal has with this album done for hymns what Cook did for American popular music. Just as you can feel in Cook’s voice all the loss, love, desire, grief, friendship, and hope behind the American songbook, so too in Paschal’s voice you can hear every gradation of faith and fear and hoped-for grace and glory of salvation at the heart of the Protestant hymnal.

This feels like a natural, comfortable place for Paschal to be at this point in her life. Having spent the last three decades of the twentieth century staying on the crest of the next wave in Christian entertainment – the gospel quartet of the 70s, the televangelism of the 80s, the rise of the Homecoming phenomenon of the 90s – Paschal has gracefully transcended the shifting currents of mainstream Christian music and recorded a deeply affecting album for the ages that might best be described as post-gospel, post-genre, post-suffering.

]]> http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/29/janet-paschal-sounds-like-sunday/feed/ http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/16/review-austins-bridge/ http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/16/review-austins-bridge/#comments Wed, 16 May 2007 00:10:34 +0000 Avery http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/16/review-austins-bridge/ Austins Bridge
Austins Bridge
Daywind, 2007
ALI: 33%

This new group’s self-titled release could more accurately have been called Rascal Flats for Christians. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Nor are the country currents coursing through the album that surprising given the visible (and sometimes audible) influence of the Crabb family on this young male trio (Aaron Crabb co-wrote the first, best, and probably most stageable tune on the project: “He Will Carry You” - imagine an all-male Ruppes with more nasality circa Seasons). The album works in a fairly conventional Christian-country style with some bluegrass and bluesy inflections but relies disproportionately on the vocal personality of the group’s ensemble sound for its appeal. Lyrically, this means the album is largely uninspired and uninspiring. The result: an uneven album whose considerable promise is diluted by artistic self-indulgence.

Another way to say this: The best and worst thing about the project is the group’s extraordinary youth. It’s not so much their age (I have no idea how old they are) but the way the project (mis)handles the youthfulness that matters. On one hand, the project is often full of an excellent blend of harmonically sophisticated voices (”He Will Carry You,” “He’s in Control” and “What I still Believe” are especially good in this regard). These guys have the natural confidence of boyz-who-have-sung-2gether-4vr. The result is often electrifying. On the other hand, the project is packed with songs (8 of 10) written or co-written by one of the group members (mostly Justin Rivers), and what wasn’t written by AB members has the feel of tunes that established writers pass along when unproven talent comes calling (“I’ve been saving this just for you …”).

Take the first verse from “I am Free,” which opens in an urban setting (”I was walking down the street / the sign read 15th avenue”) and finds one of our young singers distracted and absorbed with the quotidian, “thinking about all the things I had to do.” Suddenly out of nowhere “A man passed by and asked me why I had a smile on my face” - [wait, wait … where did this smile come from? I thought he was distracted?] - “then I told him of God’s love and how he saved me by his grace.” Nevermind the implausibility of this little story (this is the kind of folksy thing that happens in a small town; a city big enough to have a busy 15th Avenue is full of people who don’t randomly interrupt strangers to ask why you’re smiling) and forget the backwards logic (smiling about God’s love while actually thinking about the million little things from everyday life you’ve got to do seems a little too split-personality for comfort). More basically it’s just a musically uninteresting song. And for a studio recording, this kind of thing makes for stultifying stuff, no matter how well harmonized.

On the third hand, these are the kinds of finer points that usually dissolve under the immediacy and emotional sweep of the live experience, and I suspect this group does quite well live (“I am Free” has an uptempo-ballad appeal to it and a singer could really sell this story from the stage, now matter how narratively dodgy it is). Herein is a bankable strength. There is plenty of room to make inroads into not just southern gospel but a number of adjacent and more profitable markets if you’re three young, good-looking guys with a gift for close harmony and making Protestant Christianity seem hip but not terribly transgressive (there are a lot of photos on the jacket art in which the boys of AB stare at the camera with studied nonchalance of the vaguely disgruntled who want to appear like they don’t care that they care so much, but the bff4vrish thank-yous in the liner notes redeemably suggest three kids who are mostly just giddy - and rightly so - at the chance to sing together and in front of more than their families or the local youth group). This ability to look like you’d fit in among several different crowds is no small thing, especially in the Christian entertainment world where factionalism and sectarian differences born of snap judgments still hold a great deal of sway (The Collingsworth Family, for instance, has a lot of the right stuff musically, but their holiness couture will in some circumstances send a bunch of misunderstood signals that will always keep them out of certain markets and venues or pigeon-hole them as a novelty act).

I have a theory that there is a “post-gospel” crowd of Christian music consumers out there who like good southern gospel and/but also like Sandi Patty and some other inspo, some CCM of the more conservative variety, the Isaacs, and a little EHSSQ, a lot of Gaither, and maybe a few cuts from Randy Travis’s or Alan Jackson’s religious music. These people are eclectic in their tastes, moderate in their theology, and don’t think of their favorites as falling along or within any of the traditional generic boundaries about which southern gospel is obsessed. Austin’s Bridge could work very well with this crowd, which I assume accounts for the visions of grandeur that evidently have been associated with them in some corners (aspirations for multi-crossover opportunities, into southern, Christian country, the fringes of CCM, and/or beyond).

But to get anywhere in this post-gospel marketplace, Austins Bridge is going to have get some real material to go with their stylishness and harmony. Southern gospel audiences may not regret owning a bunch of second-rate cds bought with concert-goggles on, but this is the exception in Christian entertainment. To make it outside sg, the cd (or the radio single) has to sell the concert ticket, not the other way around.

As tempting as it may be to self-indulge in a record deal with a top sg label that lets you write your own ticket, cutting an album full of your own songs and relying on your Abercrombie & Fitch mystique to make up for the difference between your look and your lyrics will only work for so long before things start to unravel. Then one guy will drift off to sing with Crystal River and another to CrossWay and a third will go run sound for TK&McCrae, leaving behind one or two Austins Bridge records that posterity judges to be more or less promising disappointments.

Inevitably, people who have any reason to dislike Kenny Bishop or his music, or generally to find fault with the Grammy treatment of sg (and I have been among this latter group) can and probably will attribute his nomination to the artificial pressure that record labels put on award nominations and ballots like these. I can even imagine really hard core conspiracists pointing to elements of Bishop’s comeback that might easily appeal to a certain kind of west coast “liberal” entertainment industry personality that seems to haunt the minds and dreams of many conservatives.

I guess I should be all high-road and take umbrage with dysfunctional (which is to say, almost every) major awards show selection process and deliver a fiery lecture about the value of objectivity in judging musical quality. But in reality, I have no real problem with either lobbying for awards or voting your values or even just voting for the guy whose label did the best job lobbying you. After all, The Grammys are always going to listen to southern gospel through a secondhand Beltone with a low battery.* The only thing you really need to know about Grammy nominations in southern gospel is that they just aren’t that important.

With that established, all that’s left is to listen to the album. I did that, and find it checks in with an ALI of 60%. Bishop writes “let grace prevail” in the liner notes, but he could have just as easily (and more fittingly) wrote, “let mercy prevail.” Indeed, “mercy” should really have been the album’s title. Mercy is everywhere. Track 1: “Lord Have Mercy.” Track 5: “Out of Mercy’s Way” (one of the more stylistically creative tunes Gerald Crabb has written in a while, even if it is somewhat flaccid). Track 7: “Under the Influence of Mercy” (a lyrically formulaic, by-the-numbers country-gospel ditty). In fact, most of the material on the project is chained together by an explicit concern with unmerited and merciful dispensation – “The Prodigal’s Dad” (which is one of the better, because more lyrically modest, Jeff Steele tunes I’ve heard), “I Can’t Believe What Grace has Done for me,” “More Than Amazing” and so on.

The merciful grace theme is apt, given Bishop’s emphasis on redemption and forgiveness in his own story. There’s a penchant among gospel artists for selecting songs with all ears on project pacing (we need another fast song to balance out these two long ballads; the tenor doesn’t have enough lines of his own) while not bothering to cast much of an eye on the lyrical content (other than to make sure that Jesus and/or blood and/or the cross and/or grace are mentioned generously). So it’s nice to encounter an album with a clearly articulated thematic agenda.

Taken as a whole, the album looks squarely, intently, from all sides, at the same point: you can trip up, screw up, or give up and yet be forgiven by grace that works on a part of you your failure can never corrupt. It’s not exactly clear who the primary audience for this message is: the meanspirited, moralistic, Christianist scolds who drove Bishop from his first career in gospel music over questions about his sexuality, or Bishop himself, who always seems to be whistling in the dark – as perhaps anyone in his position would – reassuring himself that he’s not all the nasty and hateful things people have said about and to him in the name of hating the sin and loving the sinner (after all, it’s no coincidence that the hate comes first).

When these kinds of volatile feelings and charged issues are so close to the surface, things inevitably are bound to get a little heavy-handed: “He’s only concerned about what’s underneath my skin,” goes one line from “God is Looking at My Heart.” No need for a secret-decoder ring there. And then there’s “Don’t Let Who You Are Keep You Away,” which comes with a baseball bat and an icepack. One can’t help but imagine someone from Bishop’s self-described “clubbing ministry” as among the intended audience here. But then Bishop himself wrote this particular song, so it’s forgivable (and not especially surprising) to find him dealing rather unsubtly with the truth he seems to have taken away from his exile from and return to gospel music.

Just as often as things are flatfooted, though, they can be quite pleasant. There’s an understated shuffly little cover of “I Need you More Today.” And “It’s Never Too Late” holds down the project’s final slot firmly and loudly. Though I physically cringed during the part of the bridge when Bishop enthusiastically speaks a few exhortative lines about not giving up (this kind of “spontaneous” gimmick never works in the studio, no matter how much you think you’ll be the one to pull it off), the song’s black gospel style, R&B ornamentations and the B-3 accompaniment provide some much-needed grittiness and oophm to the album’s finale.

Bishop excels vocally as a stylistic minimalist. With age and experience, he’s filtered out most of the nasally honk that came from singing with his family (something his brother, Mark, has never figured out how to do), and the distilled remainder has a bracing, almost boyish clarity to it. What it lacks, though, is a certain warm-bloodedness. The solemn and reflective emotional tone that Bishop seems to have gone for on the album, while understandable, only exacerbates this problem, so much so that “It’s Never Too Late” has the effect of turning up the house lights right about the time you’re beginning to lose interest and maybe nod off. Yes, yes, you’ve been forgiven. Don’t judge a book by its cover. There’s always hope. [stifled yawn] Ok, ok, we get it. “It’s Never Too Late” falls in line with the album’s mercy-me theme. But whereas much of the rest of the project tends to hug itself somewhat sentimentally, as if contemplating the wondrous discovery of suffering’s many textures, this final song on the album has a lip-snarling, head-nodding, “that’s what I’m talkin’ bout” kinda manner to it that gives voice to the defiant and exuberant, bittersweet celebratory side of post-traumatic experiences.

And if, on the other hand, you tend to take your music without a side of psychospiritual analysis, it’s a song - like much of the rest of the album - that’s easy and pleasant to listen to and feel good along with. (Incidentally, the song owes a good deal of its success to the chorus of big-name BGVs helping out there and elsewhere on the project – indeed, let me add a subtitle to my imaginary renaming of this album, Mercy: Kenny Bishop and Friends.)

None of this may, with apologies to Emily Dickinson, take the top of anyone’s head off with its musical majesty or lyrical power, but it’s good – if not great – music. Is it Grammy material? I don’t know, but then we already know that the Grammys have never been much of a measure of gospel music anyway. So listen to it for what it’s worth.

Update: For a take on Bishop’s album before he was Grammy news, I recommend David Bruce Murray’s review from back when the project first came out.

*Sidebar: Here’s how I imagine Grammy picks for sg happening. There’s some catching of a few bars of a song on the radio while visiting one of those southern cities with Ash in its name, there’s some listening to whatever buzz makes it out of sg’s tightly knit subculture and into the mainstream, there’s some asking around among friends or acquaintances who know more it than you do, and finally there’s waiting for the lobbyists or someone who impresses you (or just buys you a nice enough dinner) to tell what you really should think and viola … another obscure downballot Grammy category covered. This is precisely the kind of approach that would yield a Crabbs nomination, for instance, from a bunch of sg outsiders. Young, interesting story, don’t wear ties, have messy hair.

And to those same outsiders, Bishop’s nomination must look like an obvious choice: the ultimate good son fallen from grace, who confronts the truth about himself, and struggles to earn a hard-won reconciliation with, rather than run away from, the music and culture that unceremoniously rejected him – emerging from crisis with a stylistically hybrid solo sound in a conventional genre full of not-soloists. It’s made-for-feature-story copy (literally … see, here it is in tomorrow’s Lexington Herald Leader). And in almost any other genre of music, it would be. Not so much, though, in southern gospel, where Bishop’s name still has a big ole asterisk by it. But you can’t fault the majority of Grammy voters for not knowing they weren’t rewarding the feel-good story of the southern gospel year.

]]> http://averyfineline.com/2006/12/08/kenny-bishops-grammy-nomination/feed/ http://averyfineline.com/2006/10/08/l5-live-in-music-city/ http://averyfineline.com/2006/10/08/l5-live-in-music-city/#comments Sun, 08 Oct 2006 22:41:56 +0000 Avery http://averyfineline.com/2006/10/08/l5-live-in-music-city/ Legacy 5
Live in Music City
Daywind 2006
ALI: 67%

If, as Cecilia Tichi claims in her book High Lonesome, the experience of country music starts in the car with the radio, the experience of southern gospel starts in the pew, the auditorium seat, the folding chair of the county fair. The live performance remains the basic unit of experience of in southern gospel. Bathed in the bright lights of the stage, arrayed in the poetry of musical lyrics, brought to life in the magical moment of live performance, southern gospel becomes psychospiritually accessible, it becomes experientially real, in a word, it is felt, in ways that no other form of contemporary evangelical expression can rival – not sermons, not motivational talks, not televangelism, not movies, not end-times fiction. None of it. To quote myself, live albums aren’t made, they happen.

Sometimes what happens in the single space of a live album can take years to bring off. Legacy 5’s latest project, Live in Music City, is in some ways the culmination of nearly a decade’s worth of cultivating and planning and building that has created an impressively loyal fan base. Cult of personality is probably a little too strong of a description, but to say it and take it back leaves just about the right impression of L5’s effect on its fans. Roger Bennett’s and Scott Fowler’s big brother/little brother relationship on stage (their way of updating the Cathedrals’ “George and the Old Man” dynamic), supported by Glenn Dustin’s and Scott Howard’s Mutt and Jeff routine, have endeared L5 as a set of personalities and personae to a core of fans who, judging from the kind of email I get from people hacked off at me for saying anything remotely critical about “my boys,” think of the group as family members they see once or twice a year (especially popular is “Cuz,” the L5 insiders’ nickname for Dustin, who I seriously think has spawned a whole race of rabidly devoted Cuzzies … seriously, they’re emails are that weird).

Live in Music City manages to capture the intensity of L5’s effect on its fans, who keep selling out by the ever increasing thousands at the Opry Land Hotel every Memorial Day. At NQC, I heard L5 roadtest the first and last songs from the album: “Strike Up the Band’ and “Truth is Marching On,” but neither song made nearly impression in Louisville that it does on the cd. “Strike Up the Band,” a Diane Wilkinson number, is without question the best southern gospel opening tune to come along since, well, “Oh Come Along,” which Wilkinson also wrote (for the Cats back in the mid 90s; and if you’re keeping score at home, “Oh Come Along” replaced another Cats’ opener, “Plan of Salvation” as the strongest lead-off song for a live set). Like “Oh Come Along,” Strike Up the Band” embodies the anatomy of a strong opening song: showcase the group’s key strengths, include a few solo lines for the piano, and do so in a snappy upper-mid-tempo fashion. In “Strike Up the Band,” a vocal inversion on the last chorus puts tenor Frank Seamans in the clutch and he comes through expertly without overdoing it or showboating. Transferring the melodic center of the song to the tenor range has the effect of taking it up a notch early on, of reaching out emotionally to the crowd and confirming their desire to be entertained – we came here full of excitement and here’s a reason to be excited. And the transition between “Strike Up the Band” and “The Blood Covers it All” is a textbook example of letting solidly arranged music do the work of good showmanship for you. The crowd is roaring with delight at the end of “Strike Up the Band,” wanting more of what they just heard, and right in that moment when they just might wonder if they’ll get a turnaround (forgetting in their excitement, of course, that you never turn around your opening tune), they get hit with the intro of the next song – “The Blood Covers it All.”

Sometimes an introduction – just the instrumental intro of a song – can be so captivating, can manage to generate an enormous sense of anticipation and deferred excitement about what’s coming next, that it rewards listening to over and over by itself. This hasn’t happened to me in a while, so I had sort of forgotten how pleasant it is to be ambushed in this way and laugh out loud in admiration of simple brilliance. “The Blood Covers it All” is not a flashy tune, but it earns its keep the old-fashioned gospel way: with patiently built blocks of close harmonies and familiar lyrical tropes that call forth the experience they describe: “I’ll never again be condemned by my sin for the blood covers it all.” You’ll have to hear the song to understand how the tune and arrangement repurpose old images of blood and redemption into a musical testimonial about the joy of second chances and the gratitude that forgiveness evokes. But you won’t need to intellectualize things quite that much to enjoy it. For my part, I was hooked from the first. The intro kicks hard twice on the four chord and then falls into these pile-driving thirds that hammer out an irresistible come-to-Jesus kinda cadence. It’s the rare sort of new song that manages to be both fresh and familiar all at once, so that you find yourself singing along with it the first time you hear it.

Unfortunately, most of what “The Blood Covers it All” achieves is promptly squandered by a big zero of a tune from Rodney Griffin, “Temporary Tomb.” Roger Bennett, whose emcee work is typically outstanding, tries really hard in his set up to convince everyone how good the song is – going so far as to joke about how Griffin usually keeps the best stuff for Greater Vision but in this case he must’ve screwed up because L5 got a good ‘un or something like that. But it only takes a few bars of the song’s dreadfully unimaginative melody and stylistic incoherence (it sorta sounds like a high-school cheer - “Mohommed … or Buddah … which one … will save ya” - crossed with a Jesus Rock garage band) to realize that there’s more truth to Bennett’s joke than fiction (the grating guitars and the blaring horns sound like the arranger was trying to distract from the go-nowhereism of the song, but it only ends up making things more unbearable). Like “Right Side of the Dirt,” “Temporary Tune” has the feel of a hook or a good title that never quite found a good song to go with it.

But in general these numbers are the exception and not the rule (and the crowd doesn’t seem to care anyway). The music is for the most part impeccably arranged, the highlight being a pleasing little bit of vocal gimmickry at the end of “I’ve Been Changed.” The song is a Glenn Dustin vehicle that he sings serviceably well (and this is probably a good point to say how nice it is that this live album hasn’t been scrubbed squeaky clean with vocal overdubs after the fact … indeed, it’s all the more rewarding to hear Dustin drop a few notes or go sharp in places and still pull the song off because that’s what actually happens in live settings. Perfection isn’t necessary. But showmanship and stage presence are, even Dustin’s particular awe-shucks overgrown-boy brand of it.) But the real hook of the song is a rhythmically suspended bridge that staggers the lead-ins of each part one on top of the other until they all get on their notes and swoop together into the rest of the chorus. It takes the crowd a few goes with this before they get it, but then when they do, they start screaming with delight – actually screaming. Even allowing for some cooking of the applause tracks in post-production, the song really kills.

Other strong moments include “Stay Close to Me,” one of two songs that feature Roger Bennett vocally. Bennett’s voice hasn’t grown on me any since I first started hearing him a decade or so ago during his vocal cameos with the Cats. And I’ve mostly given up complaining about the schizophrenia that Bennett’s sometimes singing creates on stage for L5 because, frankly, I’m pushing against the ocean here. Not only do such complaints seem ungenerous during Bennett’s grim struggle with leukemia, but practically speaking his vocal walk-ons for one or two songs bring the house down. Of course, so do five minutes of somebody’s kid stammering her way through “Jesus Wuves Me.” Which is why I continue to believe that Bennett’s strength is at the piano and as an emcee, that his turns as a soloist come off a little like the president of the firm starring in all the company’s ads because he can, not because he can actually act. But then this is why I’m here and they’re there. At any rate, “Stay Close to Me” and “But God” (which, in the interest of fairness, I should probably mention is also a Rodney Griffin song) are both strong tunes that would stand on their own even without the powerful emotional effect Bennett creates when he sets up and sings a song in the context of cancer. The album winds up strongly with “My, My, My,” backed up by the Voices of Lee choir, and “Truth is Marching On” (you can read here about how and why the performance of this song is essentially a moot point now).

Listening to the album, I’m reminded of something a friend of mine said after hearing L5 a few times live. They’re much better in ensemble work than any one member is solo. This is especially true of Seamans, who can be underwhelming by himself but can singlevoicedly make the difference between good and great for the group in ensemble work (in this case, see “Strike Up the Band” and “My, My, My” especially). This is, I think, more than just so much proof of that old truism about sums and parts. L5’s sound and their act have crystallized into a single, disciplined expressive style capable of creating the conditions in which it will succeed, capable of making its own emotional weather on stage, capable, in short, of making live music, happen.

The Perrys
Come Thirsty
Daywind 2006
ALI: 63%

Comparing the Perrys to the Goodmans is such a commonplace in gospel music that it has become less of a compliment and more of a critical crutch, a way to sound perceptive and historically literate without really having to say anything terribly insightful, indeed without having to listen much at all. Of course the Perrys eagerly cultivate this comparison.

For all its reverence and seriousness, the Perrys’ Remembering the Goodmans album from 2005 was, after all, the ultimate extension of what started long ago as Libbi Perry-Stuffle’s better-than-the-real-thing imitation of Vestal Goodman’s “God Walks the Dark Hills.” But something happened on the way to life imitating the Goodman’s larger-than-life art in this case. As Perry-Stuffle’s out-Vestalling Vestal suggests, the Perrys have gone well beyond imitation of the Goodmans’ style and, with Come Thirsty, have pretty clearly managed to surpass it.

The first three songs of the album - “Until the Last One is Home,” “Still Thrilled,” and “Day that Never Ends” - are a better tribute to the Goodmans than anything on the Perry’s slavish Goodmans album. “Day that Never Ends” is reticulated with delightful little Goodman moves: the way dotted quarter-notes are used to punch up certain words such as “together” and “never” rather than singing them in straight time (this is one way the Goodmans were able to keep simple I-IV-V music from sounding monotonous), the piano trilling and running all around the vocals, and the shuffling gait.

“Still Thrilled” feels a little too much like a warmed over “Still Blessed” reimagined in the style of Vestal, but “Until the Last One is Home” opens the album pitch perfectly and is perhaps the most pleasing and well sung bass-lead I’ve heard in years (Tracy Stuffle and the song’s arranger(s) deserve an extra gold star for pulling off the most enjoyable bass-note ending since Greater Vision’s remake of “I Didn’t Know” on the live recording of the Quartets project, and this depsite the fact that you can’t really understand what in the heck Stuffle is saying in his bass lead lines on the chorus).

It’s as if the Perrys use the first three songs of Come Thirsty to work out the emotional residue from their work on the Goodmans’ project because the remainder of the album goes in several different directions. The cinematic ballad “He Will Hide Me,” sung mainly by Loren Harris, anchors the album emotionally. A self-possessed edge has crept into Harris’s voice with age, giving him Herculean reach (listen to the second verse). And the song’s intricately shaded orchestration has the expansiveness of a Broadway show stopper or an operatic overture. In fact, the song demands the kind of investment of emotion and extension of empathy usually associated with musical drama.

“He Will Hide Me” seems to aspire to the kind of power-ballad position that “Calvary Answers For Me” occupied on the This is the Day* album (one title even vaguely echoes the other), but I’m not sure “Hide” is lyrically up to that level, and certainly it’s not up to the level of its own melody and arrangement here. Words, though, hardly seem to matter in moments when Harris and Joseph Habedank share a splendid few bars of harmony, or when Perry-Stuffle’s voice comes out of nowhere to take the lead and then recedes back into the ensemble with the stealthy confidence that often comes to vocalists only after their voice itself has peaked, or when the orchestra’s trumpets sound a transition that seem almost to presage a more apocalyptic trumpet blast.

“Walk Away Free,” an airy, medium tempo number with a reliable hook, balances the heftiness of “Hide Me” and sounds like a shoo-in for an early single. “He Forgot” moves along ably enough that it’s easy to … well, forget that the chorus’ hook - “He forgot more than I’ll ever know” - doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the context of the verses, which talk about all the transgressions that have required God’s forgiveness. I get the “sea of forgetfulness” allusion here, but what does it matter that God has forgotten more than I’ll ever know when what the song really seems to want to say is that he forget all that I ever did when I asked forgiveness? But no matter. Tap your toe hard enough and you’ll be sufficiently distracted to enjoy the song.

This cannot, alas, be said of others. “When Jesus Prays” is a melodically meandering tune that sounds like a good idea (”hey, wouldn’t ‘When Jesus Prays’ be a great title?“) in search of a song that’s never really found. Ditto “Why Trouble the Master.” Though it’s catchier than “When Jesus Prays,” “Why Trouble” pivots on the ghoulish line, “I know he makes dead things rise.” Entire pet cemeteries and miles of sludgy road kill levitate before my eyes every time I hear this song in the car. Dead things? Ick. And finally, the title track manages to be both turgid and singsongy, though given that the Life of Love title track also fizzled and sputtered, maybe there’s a logic here that finer minds than mine appreciate.

As I’ve noted before, in the mix of material on a given album, the Perrys can end up sounding like everyone and no one. That’s fortunately not the case here. They are wholly themselves and for the most part (63% of the time to be exact), Come Thirsty sates the thirst it solicits. The Goodmans never had the stylistic or creative range showcased here; at their best, they bent every song to their will. The Perrys, on the other hand, rise (or try) to meet their material, which in this case means they end up sounding as good - but also as bad - as the songwriting. June 23, 2006 12:07 PM [comments]

*Originally I had said Life of Love here, incorrectly so. Thanks to DM for pointing that out.

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.

The George Younce Tribute project that Gaither released earlier this year rotated around in the mix of things on my iPod the other day (I had forgotten to listen to it after I initially digitized the album), and about half way through, I found myself wondering, “Why is this so unsatisfying?” Partly the answer lies in the question, why is GAITHER’S tribute to Younce so unsatisfying? This is a fully Gaitherized compilation, which means we don’t get anything that didn’t get recorded on the stage of a Gaither event, which in turn means the earliest of anything we get here is the early 90s. It’s not that Younce wasn’t at the top of his game in his final years (even when his health and voice were in decline his presence alone realigned the center of gravity when he took the stage). But the emotional climatron of Gaither’s events - the way everyone competes to be even MORE thrilled than the person next to him about how much more outrageously fantastic and gloriously glorious each performer is than the next, the thou-protesteth-too-much guffawing at things that are only mildly funny, how Gloria’s poems ALWAYS make somebody cry, Jessy Dixon’s makeup - all of this manages to (inadvertently) give two false impressions simultaneously: that Younce was just another loveable Old Friend and that anything he sang was fantastic. Never mind that’s not true. Because the material collected here is live, it receives the Gaitherized responses of Gaither’s live audiences (both performers and regular fans alike) who tend to respond with undifferentiated enthusiasm to just about everything officially sanctioned by Gaither Himself.

First, Younce of course was so much more than an Old Friend. I suppose if the choice was between releasing a project full of Gaither-owned Younce and Cathedrals recordings and releasing nothing at all, this is better than nothing. But Younce’s best moments - and the thing that made him such a superstar - was not his solo ability. And this brings us to the second point: Not everything Younce sang was all that great, especially not his solo numbers. These solo songs often had a novelty or carnivalesque feel to them: here, that would be represented by the insufferable “Laughing Song,” the talk-singing of “Led out of Bondage,” the syrupy “God Loves to Talk to Little Boys” or even “This Ole House,” which (though popular) has always struck me as formulaic and an unremarkable giddy-up set piece (what IS enjoyable to hear on the “This Ole House” recording is the response of the crowd to this song, which was recorded at Gaither’s Farewell concert for the Cats and so feels a little more authentic than a typical Gaither Homecoming).

These are the kinds of songs that become essentially trademark acts for stars of a certain stature, but what made the bass singer for the Cathedrals a legend - what made him Just George to gospel music - was his way of being at once fully in command of the stage, the room, the show and yet fully a part of the Cathedrals. Younce was not a soloist, nor was he a one-man show, which makes a Tribute to George Younce alone problematic from the start. What he was, was a showman, in every deep and reverential sense of the word. As the term itself - showman - suggests, the man cannot be separated from the show, and the show in which Younce glowed so brightly was an ensemble act. Which is why I find the most effective and representative moments on the project to be songs that at best co-feature or momentarily spotlight Younce: “Sinner Saved By Grace” (Younce and Glen Payne share the verses); “Up Above my Head” (Younce and Jake Hess share verses; this is perhaps the most enjoyable tune on the project,); “Child of the King” (Younce and, it sounds like, Brock Speer share verses).

These songs come closer to capturing the ineffable way he created moments of transcendence and grace on stage with other performers - that is, the way he was Just George - often without singing at all. Sometimes it was just a little laugh, a soft word spoken where a note might more typically be sung (I describe one such moment here). At other times it was nothing more or less than standing off to the side of the stage and smiling and pointing and tapping his foot (you can see this on the Can He, Could He, Would He video during “Land of the Living”). Or calling out “oh boys that’s the way to sing that song right there … do that little trio part again … I LOVE that little trio part …” And away we went.

Ok, so maybe as Tribute projects go, this one isn’t any less successful than a different collection of George Younce songs might have been. What, after all, does a life sound like? What we have here is no more or less than we’re left with when someone is dead - memories - and memories differ from person to person. Gaither’s are, in the end, as accurate and as partially successful as anyone else’s would be. Perhaps all we can hope for - ever - from Tribue projects are these kinds of feeble approximations from a recording archive that at best send back to us faint sounds of a life that always seemed to exceed and outshine the meager scale of even the largest stage and the biggest crowds.

At some point in their careers, pop musicians will either think about releasing or actually record a song just in time for wedding season, aimed at the scores of young brides selecting hooky ditties with dewy-eyed lyrics full of sentimental imagery (think “Butterfly Kisses”). Common Thread half-way makes me think the Oaks are trying to aim this project at the other end of life’s ceremonies: the funeral crowd. I say “half way” because a good half of these songs are dirgy, exhausted tunes, sung in the slow, overearnest fashion of people trying to sound the way they think gospull sangers sound: among the tunes comprising the dirge-a-thon, “God Will Take Care of You,” “How Great Thou Art,” “He Did it All For Me,” and of course “Amazing Grace” (this particular warrior’s sword needs to be retired, methinks). The other half, though, is an upbeat mix of old and new. At its best, the project clips along with the easy familiarity of the old guys at your home church who have played guitars and sung songs like “I Saw the Light” and “This Little Light” and “Jesus is Coming Soon” since forever. Nothing here is terribly inspiring, but one should never pass up an opportunity to hear the Oaks return to where they began, sort of.

A while back, I tried to sort out the strengths and weaknesses of Karen Peck and New River, only to discover a great deal in the group’s history, style, and management to be ambivalent about. “The tragic truth of KPNR,” I concluded, “is that the group seems self-exiled in the wilderness of their own unrealized ambition.” Even with my guard up for signs that I might simply be looking for what I was prepared to find in Good to Be Free, there’s not much in this latest offering to dispel my thesis about self-defeating tendencies.

First there’s the dearth of creativity in the song selection. Exhibit A: an embarrassing cover of the clichéd “One Day at a Time” (didn’t Christie Lane pretty much drive every last inch of mileage from this tune?). Franchise singers like Peck oughtn’t to cover tunes like “One Day at a Time” unless they’re aiming for a career like … well, Christie Lane. (And while we’re on the subject of Peck … honestly, she’s got to stop that breathy speak-singing thing she does. It’s really becoming an obnoxious affectation, all the more so because of how unnecessary it is if you have a voice like hers.) Second and related to the song-selection problem, the project is lyrically impoverished. Two songs built centrally around the idea of famines. Two songs mortgaged heavily to “touching”: “just a touch” in case, and “just one touch,” in the other. And two songs about leaning on Jesus. Is repetition passing for thematic unity these days?

The brightest spot in the project, to my ear anyway, is “I’m Gonna Get Up,” a nice upbeat tune featuring Devon McGlammery. Close behind is “Good to Be Free” and “Hold Me While I Cry” (take out the references to Jesus and the Lord here, and this croonable song could easily show up on a Clint Black or Reba McIntyre album, a Peck sings it just as well). But there’s too much fog and sameness in between these glimmers of brightness. We know Peck is a star singer. She really is. Which is why it’s too bad she continues to content herself with projects like this one - well sung and professionally produced but stylistically flatfooted and musically flaccid. Such contentedness is, one fears, going to keep her and her group perpetually on the edges of real greatness.