My Own Little World

I recently fell in love with House of Heroes after listening to their 2010 album Suburba  (which is the most fun I've had listening to music all summer). Their alternative rock sensibilities absolutely refreshed me, while their musical complexity reminded me of the Beatles in its simplistic nature. Their new EP Smoke  doesn't come out until August 19, but because I supported their IndieGoGo project I got it a little early, so I felt it was only right to share my thoughts on it with you. Lyrically, Smoke  carries a theme of overcoming intrusion into our lives from good and bad influences by the knowledge of our salvation in Christ. This begins with "Bottle Rocket," as it conveys the invasion of a catastophe intending to consume our souls. "Wake Up Screaming" is about searching for a lost purpose in our lives, while "The Worst Kind of gods" discusses false belief and hypocrisy and adds some spoken word about not seeking our own devices to hamme...

Some of you may not believe me, but I actually have a schedule for reviewing music. I look at upcoming releases and preorder what I can on iTunes so I can stay on track. However, this time I deviated from the norm. I had no intentions of reviewing Swoope's new album Sinema , but several sites had it rated so consistently high I just had to take a look. I can tell you right now that I am extremely glad I did so. What Swoope has done with Sinema  is create an incredibly appetizing concept album that only gets better with more listens. The central story deals with themes of temptation, consequences, and the struggle between our flesh and our Godly nature. I find this notable and quite risky, as most Christian rappers deal with rejecting the status quo of Christianity instead of more relevant topics such as this. It revolves around Swoope and his relationship with a fictional character, Mya Desirae. The story is kept running by phone calls between the various tracks...

This review has taken me a long time to be able to write. Looking back I can find only one reason for this. This is the only time I have ever guessed about an album and been dead wrong. I'm glad I was wrong, too. As you can see from my past two posts, I don't have the most welcoming view of Hillsong Live (now Hillsong Worship). To me, it felt like they made re-recordings of the same album every year, slightly changing the instrumentation in the process. Lyrically, this album does not differ greatly from previous Hillsong albums. For the most part, the album's lyrics focus on Christ and His sacrifice and how His Name is the Name above all other names. This is essential for a worship album, as the focus needs to be on God and not those worshiping Him. "Broken Vessels (Amazing Grace)" is a prime example of this. Besides the fact that it uses the lyrics to the hymn's first verse in an extremely clever way, it references the fact that we are broken people t...

In my last post, I covered all the reasons why I did not like Hillsong for the longest time. Those of you that are Hillsong fans may be wanting to ask me a lot of questions, but I am confident that many of them will be answered in the following words. Leading worship over the past few years has shown me one of the coolest things about Hillsong: it is an incredible resource for churches around the world. No other worship band that I know of could write at least ten new songs each year and not have them all be awful. If a church were to use Hillsong exclusively as their song catalog for worship, they would have an extremely robust selection of songs to sing. My perception of United has begun to change over the past couple years. Specifically, their 2013 studio album Zion is what changed my view of Hillsong in general. On Zion was a collection of songs that were God-focused and wildly original in their music. It was almost unrecognizable as a Hillsong album due to their house...

As my few regular readers will note, I have started to preface my music reviews with a little background on my thoughts going into my listening of an album. In preparation for my review of Hillsong Worship's (formerly Hillsong Live) upcoming album No Other Name , I felt that I needed to elaborate on my thoughts surrounding the Hillsong brand due to some past comments I have made about their music. This is the first part of a two-part series on this topic. Hillsong is probably one of the most famous names in Christian music, but most casual listeners will not realize that Hillsong is actually the name of a megachurch in Sydney, Australia, that identifies with the Pentecostal tradition. Within the church, there are several different bands that all serve different purposes. For this first writing, I will limit them to Live (the main worship team) and United (the youth band). There are and were many more, but these are the only two that have stood the test of time and stayed releva...

Have you ever expected something totally different than what you got when seeing a movie? I have on several occasions, the most recent being Godzilla . The first trailer I saw for it was very involving and well-done and made me want to see the film until I saw the title. I know next to nothing about the legendary monster and was not very eager to learn anything about him either. However, after noting the goals for the tone and feel of the film, I decided to give it a go. I could not have been more surprised with what I got. I expected the military to be hunting Godzilla, trying to destroy him before he destroyed the entire eastern seaboard. Instead the plot almost acknowledges Godzilla with the reverence of a god. Ken Watanabe's character, Dr. Ishiro Serizawa, has been searching for him for quite some time and constantly urges the military to let Godzilla be the hero (spoiler: they do) and kill the two MUTOs, or massive unidentified terrestrial organisms, that have been terr...

When I saw the music video for "Midnight," the first song released from Coldplay's new album Ghost Stories , I was more than a little perplexed. This song was like nothing I had ever heard before in its eerie vocals and sweeping synths, but I just did not like it. Then the first official single, "Magic," was announced along with the album. Seeing the track listing and the running time made me even more curious. Well, Ghost Stories  has been released, and I could not be more convinced that you'll love it. The beginning of the album is surprisingly down-tempo and melancholy. With previous openers such as "Hurts Like Heaven" from Mylo Xyloto  and "Life in Technicolor" from Viva La Vida , I expected something much happier than "Always In My Head." That is when I started listening to the lyrics to see why this might be, and I found out exactly why: this is a breakup album. As some of you may know, Chris Martin, Coldplay's fro...