29th
August, 2007
JUSTIN MICHAEL
Album: The Altar And The Door
Artist: Casting Crowns
Year: 2007
Label: Reunion
Enhanced: No
In a word: Gutsy
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"This is just unashamed message music and you’ve got to respect the guts of that." |
If you’ve never heard Casting Crowns before, you may not know that they are a group of passionate musos birthed out of leading youth groups. You may not know they have always been willing to put mini-sermons in their music. If you didn’t know before, all you need do is spin the first track of The Altar And The Door.
What This World Needs is a challenge to how we show Christ to our world. It is not backward and it does not pull punches. It is a rock track that includes young people speaking about how we could share our faith - “we can be passionate about what we believe, but we can’t strap ourselves to the Gospel cause we’re slowing it down. Jesus is going to save the world but maybe the best thing that we can do is get out of the way”.
It is remarkably bold and is a pre-cursor to an album that will continue on driving home these mini-sermons such as Slow Fade that speaks of lives that crumble over time because of bad choices and The Word Is Alive that also includes a spoken word section speaking of how the Bible came together.
You get the feeling that this set of songs are written around a devotional series. From themes of who Christ is in All Because of Jesus, being luke-warm in Somewhere In The Middle or the purpose of each person in Every Man.
Musically this is very middle-America rock, but I don’t think that’s the point with Casting Crowns. You’re not going to be impressed with new musical ideas, raw energy rock or sparkling pop, but you will get great melodies in solid songs that say so much more than your tofu-type album-rack filler. Usually that wouldn’t be enough, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. This is just unashamed message music and you’ve got to respect the guts of that.
Whether you agree with everything CC preach - and yes, they do preach - if you’re like me, you’ll simply enjoy the challenge they set out in this new set of songs aimed at addressing the gap between the altar and the door.
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