My Own Little World

One of my friends called Reputation “fun trash,” and I’m beginning to agree with him. Taylor Swift’s sequel to her 80s-laden synthpop tribute 1989 – an album I thought was incredibly solid and more substantial than her previous work – has all the components of today’s latest trashy pop music. It has celebrity feuds, horrible break-ups, dubstep hooks fused with R&B rhythms – it’s all here. And I’m feeling somewhat…disappointed. Granted, being someone who loved the music of 1989 and its trendy nature makes it pretty plain that I don’t care for just any pop music. My favorite pop album of the year was Lorde’s Melodrama , a beautiful synthpop record with some indie flair that subverted the lyrical trends of most pop music by showing what happens after the party ends. Besides the musical quality of the record, what I loved most was that Lorde retained who she was – an outsider wanting to offer a slight critique of what the industry pushes as its product. Taylor Swift, ...

A few months ago, a British worship artist by the name of Ian Yates got in contact with me, asking me to review his upcoming album. I jumped at the chance to get a bit of an early look at a (at least in the United States) relatively unknown artist while also getting to form a bit of a relationship directly with people actually making their own music. I went and listened to all of Ian's back catalog to make sure I had a proper perspective on this new album. To be honest, I'm not really a huge fan of a whole lot of his older stuff, as it fits into the modern worship box way too snugly. There was definitely some evident improvement as I went from album to album, but on the whole it's by the books worship music. I didn't think his material was bad; it just didn't grab me in any meaningful way. That being said, Ian's new project Awaken to Love  has a lot more to offer than his prior work. It's got some solid lyricism and musical composition that are just in...

Kings Kaleidoscope is one of the rare bands in Christian music that isn't afraid to do whatever they want. Looking at their discography makes this plainly obvious. In addition to recording church-focused worship music (most of it from their days at Mars Hill Church in Seattle), they have also created what I cite as one of the most game-changing albums in all of Christian music, their full-length debut Becoming Who We Are . It combined the sonic complexities of the incredibly dense indie rock created by bands like Broken Social Scene, The Polyphonic Spree, and Arcade Fire with incredibly poignant, heartfelt, vertical lyrics. Here's the question, though: how do you follow that absolutely perfect, widely acclaimed monstrosity? Well, in Beyond Control , Kings Kaleidoscope has given us the answer, and I don't know if it's the one that everyone (especially me) was expecting. You see, one of the things I loved about Becoming Who We Are  is its sonic density and complex...