Review Summary: Another addition to the plethora of painfully generic Christian music. From a band that was set apart from that...
The crowd of Christian music you hear on the radio sounds so similar.
Chris Tomlin is a perfect example of something you will hear on said radio. The problem with hearing him is that he sounds like every other artist that makes Christian Themed music. The part that makes this even worse is that people still cash into this because they completely ignore that fact that poor songwriting, autotuned singing, etc. is not made up by the fact that they have one or two decent songs.
Not all Christian music is generic and badly executed, though.
Third Day incorporate rock elements into the music to make it good for variety within the genre. This band, Casting Crowns followed that lead, and in 2003 released their Debut selftitled, and it was stellar, in my opinion. Mark Hall is an excellent singer, and all the band members knew what they were doing. After that release came
Lifesong, and it followed the same lead, still keeping things fairly interesting.
The Altar and the Door followed after that, and it easily their best effort. Musical maturity was stellar and the lyrics were insanely good for Christian Music.
And then their drummer left.
Being as he is a Youth Minister, he went away to pursue that and that alone. After finding a new drummer, they released
Until The Whole world hears and they took a nosedive in quality. It's by no means a bad album, but after a release like The Altar... it is disgusting.
Come to the Well was after, and showed that they were quickly forgetting what made them great in the first place.
And now here we are... with... Thrive...
Mark Hall – lead vocals and songwriter
Juan DeVevo – guitar and background vocals
Chris Huffman – bass and background vocals
Megan Garrett – piano, keyboards, backing vocals
Melodee DeVevo – violin, backing vocals, cello
Brian Scoggin – drums
Josh Mix – lead guitar and background vocals
With that many members in the band, you'd expect them all to do something, right?
Well, if this is a rock-centric album, You'd expect to hear Guitar Playing, and riffing from them. Does it appear here? Yes. It's bad. What happened? From them making amazing use of the guitars such as in "American Dream" from their first effort, or even "Until the Whole World hears", I can see the guitarists standing there in the studio doing nothing the entire time. Actually, not many instruments are present, except from pathetically lousy drumming.
"Thrive" is a huge example of this. Mostly all I can hear is the drumming and singing, with some acoustic guitar thrown in. It also takes a generic song structure, even with the painfully terrible "praise" bridge which actually made me facepalm listening to this the first time. I am so sick of hearing this cop-out on christian albums as a cop out for long song length. Actually, song length is a problem. The songs DRAG on the album. "Thrive" needs to be little more than 3 minutes, not 5. What is there to keep me interested?
The second track is the best on the whole album. "All You Ever Wanted" screams with potential, but is ruined by the flaws that are present in the rest of the album. Female vocals are tacked on like it was forced. In case you didn't notice, you can hear a small presence of violin and cello, although it's so minor that it might as well be disregarded. I have no idea if this is bad production, or just laziness. The Vocoder "Whoa-oh" is painfully bad as well.
Without doubt, the best songs on the album are the slowest. "Broken Together" and "House of Their Dreams" are fantastic tracks.
Overall, this would have been a decent album if it wasn't for the fact that any rock elements they had were tacked on, and with them losing creativity.
A return to roots was rumored, and it was never grounded (both puns intended)
