Lamenting Through Lent With Rachel Wilhelm and Bifrost Arts

It's all too much. Really all too much...

Honestly, who knew life was going to be this hard?

Our days can either be viewed as: 
long successions of joy and fruitfulness dotted with periodic times of suffering and trial
or
periodic times of joy and fruitfulness spent fretting over the more frequent times of suffering and trial.

I have lived a very good and full life up to this point, but oh if it doesn't seem like it is often the latter of these two options. So much time is spent planning and hoping for things to happen and much of the rest of the time is spent realizing exactly how difficult it is to make anything happen. It would seems our days are full of hindrances set to divert us from our plans...

Here's a very small case in point: 

I am a church music leader and for several months I have wanted to immerse myself in two particular albums in preparation for the season of Lent:
Rachel Wilhelm's Songs of Lament (free download on Noisetrade) (streaming or purchase on Bancamp) 
and
Bifrost Arts Lamentations (streaming or purchase on Bandcamp

Album Review: Fernando Ortega's "The Crucifixion of Jesus"

Last week I was able to interview Fernando Ortega for the PostConsumer Reports Podcast. This week I am featuring a review of his new album The Crucifixion of Jesus, which you can order at his website: www.fernandoortega.com. You can listen to our interview here:


Subscribe to the podcast on itunes or check out the podcast page to subscribe on Stitcher, Google Play, Tunein, and PocketCasts.

You can also stream/download the album on itunes, Amazon, or Spotify.

It's been six years since Fernando Ortega last released an album, and his new work The Crucifixion of Jesus finds him creating music in mainly the same vein as he has been for the past decade. And yet this new collection finds the New Mexican singer-songwriter beginning to paint on a much larger canvas. As we have come to expect from Ortega, this album features a gorgeous collection of hymn re-tunings and spiritual songs, but Ortega is now 60 and you can tell he feels mortality weighing on his bones. 

Problem: Is The Walking Dead the Kind of Show You Would Watch Again?

A couple of years ago, while watching the season 5 opener of The Walking Dead, I had a strong and unexpected visceral experience. I mean this literally, in that my insides were actually shaking.

For Walking Dead viewers the end of season 4 was a huge buildup to Rick Grimes and his clan of survivors' arrival at Terminus, which was a cataclysmic disaster. The people of Terminus were cannibals and managed to quickly take Rick and all his people captive. Season 5 opens in the frenzied confusion of a flashback of Terminus' tragic beginnings and the darkened battle-planning of Rick's crew from inside their cargo freight prison. Soon though, Rick, Daryl, Glenn, Bob, and a few people we don't know find themselves in a human slaughterhouse knelt above a feeding trough, awaiting their deaths. One by one the victims' throats are slit until they get to Glenn, whereupon his potential death is dangled before us a number of times as outside gunshots are heard and Rick distracts Gareth, the Terminus leader, by threatening to kill him. 

Eventually, due mostly to Carol, they all escape and zombie hoard chaos ensues, but once everything died down I realized I had had an actual physical reaction to watching all of this. My hands and my guts were quivering. I was down there in the trenches with them. I had immersed myself in their trauma and my adrenalin was flowing freely. I was the farthest thing from a detached viewer. I cared deeply about these people and I felt like I had become one of them.

Later on, perhaps weeks later, after a few other experiences similar to this, I came to a realization: I don't think I can watch any of this again. This is not something I want to put myself through more than once.

Grandpa Rock Review: Paul Simon and Phil Keaggy

This summer I realized my album buying habits really reflect my age. I am only in my mid-30's but I am essentially a Grandpa Rock enthusiast. When given the opportunity to buy new music (which I still buy on CD and then possibly vinyl) I bypassed the most lauded Dad Rock album of the year (Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool) and went straight for the Grandpa Rock Royalty of Paul Simon's latest (and perhaps last) Stranger to Stranger. Added to this, I had been eagerly waiting since the end of last year for Phil Keaggy to release a new album, which got funded on Kickstarter. Those of us who backed the album, which is now called All At Once, got to download it earlier in the summer, but the official release came in September.

These are the albums I was most anticipating: 2 rock legends from the 60's and 70's, one an American icon and possible Greatest Living Songwriter, the other a pillar of the Jesus Music era and one of the world's most renowned guitar players.

Album Review: Audrey Assad's Inheritance

It is not very often I will shell out money for an album that consists of mostly reworked hymns, but Audrey Assad's 2016 release Inheritance is just that good. In fact, as soon as I listened through it on Relevant Magazine's The Drop I realized "This is an album that needs to be listened to on vinyl." It was vinyl-worthy, meaning there was something timeless and set apart about it. (You can purchase the album on vinyl and other formats here.)

There are so many re-tuned hymns projects these days, many of them excellent. From Cardiphonia, to Bifrost Arts, to Indelible Grace, to on and on and on and...well, there is just so many churches and organizations and artists doing great work out there that it is really truly an accomplishment to create a work that actually stands out. Allow me to repeat: Assad's Inheritance stands out.

TV Review: The First Week of Late Show With Stephen Colbert

How did I do?

In my opinion there is not a smarter person on television than Stephen Colbert. Despite the comedic facade there also is not a more sincere person, a person who cares more about their craft, and about connecting with people through their craft. I am speaking in superlatives I know, but there does seem to be something about Colbert that differentiates him from all the others (and not just his late night competition) and there seems to be something different in how he is shaping the new Late Show.

Post-Humous Record Review: This Train's "The Emperor's New Band" and "Mimes of the Old West"

Post-Humous Record Reviews: a personal refection on a long-forgotten album in need of a resurrection.

The music of the rockabilly band This Train came about at an interesting time for me personally as well as for the Christian music industry (CCM) in general.

My 3 Sentence Review of Coldplay's Ghost Stories

Coldplay's new album Ghost Stories contains almost no compelling musical ideas (except for maybe 3 tracks: "Magic", "Midnight", and uh...if I'm being generous "A Sky Full of Stars), manages to make the breakdown of a relationship sound dull, and is the first Coldplay album I actually regret purchasing (and I have all their albums). Consisting of songs with mostly 2 or 4 chord chord progressions, uninteresting ambient sounds, and a slew of synths and drum machines,* they hardly sound like a cohesive band anymore but instead a synthetic studio production. The main question is this: why was something so sub-standard even released into the world at all? 

A Wonderfully Conflicted Evening: David Bazan Concert Review

David Bazan performing solo at Thirty-Thirty Cofee
(photo courtesy of Ty Paluska).

Last Wednesday night my wife and I got to see the second night of David Bazan's two night sold out stint at Thirty-Thirty Cofee in Peoria (Peoria!).  It was wonderful.

At around 9:30 he and his tour manager (that's a guess) parked right outside the coffee shop.  He grabbed his guitar out of the trunk, came in the main door where all our chairs were facing, pulled out his guitar, and started playing, no sound system, just a man and his guitar.  He played without pretension and with honest, raw passion and practiced skill. Bazan's voice is a rarity.  It is a husky strong baritone and yet somehow delicate, commanding the room even when he easily enters into a raspy falsetto.  In more ways than one he resembles the big ole bear he played next to the whole night (Thirty-Thirty's mascot, a massive stuffed polar bear painted black to fit in with the German decor of the now defunct Jumer's castle lodge in Peoria).

I am always astounded at natural performers, performers who are so confident and at peace within themselves that their art just emanates from them.  They give off the aura that they do not need us to be there as an audience, that they would be creating anyway, and that they have merely chosen to play for us as a pure gift.  Bazan is this kind of performer.