‘All God’s Children: Songs From The British Jesus Rock Revolution 1967-1974’: "‘All God’s Children’ assembles the best of the British Christian acts, including such respected names as Out Of Darkness (and their earlier incarnation, garage R&B act The Pilgrims), Parchment, Whispers Of Truth and Judy MacKenzie. It also features the secular alongside the sacred, including the likes of Strawbs, Moody Blues, Amazing Blondel, John Kongos and Medicine Head – bands who, though theologically shyer than their more overtly Christian contemporaries, all wrote songs with a strong spiritual message." "Mr. Wells and Grapefruit Records have outdone themselves with their detailed research, their ability to find tracks both profound and disturbing, and providing liner notes worthy of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This set is not just for the Jesus freak, but for anyone who is interested in how movements of all sorts find their voice through popular music."
'Question of Balance' - The Moody Blues: "In the liner notes to the CD of Question Of Balance Hayward speaks of how Question was a protest song about the wars of the day but also a response to the breakdown of the sixties and the loss of the dream of the time. There is no doubt that this lyric shows a band reaching beyond what the hippy can achieve in the resources of humanity and seeking a transcendent power to bring the miracle that is recognised as crucial to some answer to our question of meaning and to our satisfaction of soul ... bass player John Lodge ... said, "In the '60s we were all looking for something. If you did a gig you'd spend hours afterwards meeting people, talking about religion. I grew up through an evangelical church, and the more I talked to people, the more I realized all the things I'd learned at church were relevant--and what everyone was looking for" ... His words are proven in a later song on the same album as Question. I remember listening to Minstrel, down the years, and thinking that I could see Jesus in the words ... For Lodge, the answer to his band mate Justin Hayward’s Questions was the Jesus of his upbringing and continuing spiritual journey. Right in the middle of their questioning album there is a quiet answer."
'Abracadabra: The Asylum Years' - Judee Sill: "Although much of Sill’s recorded output is loaded with images and symbology from Christianity, you won’t hear her songs played on your local devotional radio station or covered during youth services on Sunday nights. For one, she was just as fascinated with the occult as with Christianity. But her relationship with faith, however one wants to define it, was idiosyncratic and unique to her and her art. She sang longingly for something, anything, beyond the physical world, throwing open her arms to its chaotic uncertainty, ascribing holy meaning to everything—from being betrayed by a lover to seeking God—in her visions of ghosts that haunted early 1970s Los Angeles. In a 1972 Rolling Stone interview, she said that though her religion is “unspeakable, it’s not unsingable.” In other words, Sill’s belief in a higher power is intensely personal and intuitive. It might not make sense to others, but it doesn’t have to. Her eclectic religious and allegorical evocations allow her to peer through these impenetrable symbols and images that are as omnipresent and intangible as air to probe their human dimensions. But her music also revels in the beauty that arises from living in and with such uncertainty, a beauty which has taken years for me to appreciate."
'#1 Record' - Big Star: "It’s remarkable–arguably the “hippest” American band of the 70s (certainly the one that indie rockers love to name-drop the most) made music that, especially on their first record, bordered on proto-Christian rock. Much of this was due to the influence of the overtly Christian Chris Bell, the co-leader of the band who in recent years has become something of a poster boy for tragic indie artistry. And indeed, if his songs are anything to go by, the guy was tortured. But first, the Christianity: a few sample lyrics of Bell’s song “My Life Is Right” off Big Star’s debut #1 Record, “Once I walked a lonely road/I had no one to share my load/But then you came and showed the way/And now I hope you’re here to stay/You give me life”. Borderline mega-church stuff, if it weren’t for all the chiming power chords and gorgeous Beatle-esque production."
'Songs from the Rain' - Hothouse Flowers: "Gone is the awestruck gusto and frantic overdubbing of People. Gone are the guest musicians and backing vocalists of Home, as well as the lush arrangements and over-production, which gave that album its ripe sound ... In their place is a sound more pastoral, with even more of an ethereal beauty. The mix is sparse, capturing the band's live sound in a way the preceding albums have not done ... The songs have also encapsulated the band's inherent spirituality - both in sound and in lyric. Some are heavily immersed in gospel, with big choral crescendoes. Where before choirs and guest vocalists were used, the backing vocals here are distinctly those of Hothouse Flowers themselves - and the harmonies are used to great effect ... Songs from the Rain is a tender and uplifting album, exploring the band's soul while reaching outward and imploring its listeners to do the same. It is a sublime creation." 'Thing of Beauty' "is ‘truth sight’, seeing things as they are in all their imperfect splendour, their ‘broken holiness’ and knowing deeply, intuitively, that all is beautiful, glorious."
'La Vita Nuova' - Maria McKee: "It's loud with emotions, deafening emotions, sweeping emotions, cathartic revelations that inspire and transfix. While earlier albums have had decades to work on me, this one had the same sort of effect instantly. Intensely personal and blissfully broad in tone, nearly every composition here rings with the kind of heart-on-the-sleeve generosity that McKee used as a performer on earlier records. She can sound like she's spinning near the edge of a cliff, about to throw herself over, and then she pulls things together and roars back into our orbit. La Vita Nuova is an extraordinary album, and the sort of thing I want to play as loudly as possible even as it seems like the world's ending around us."
'Grace Will Lead Me Home' - Angeline, Cohen & Jon: "This project, which commemorates the 250th anniversary of the writing of the hymn [Amazing Grace], has new songs to explore the dichotomy between the song and the sometime trade of its writer. It is heady stuff." "All credit, then, to Jon Bickley, for pulling all this together, he being a poet, folksinger, radio and podcast producer from Bucks, instigator of the Invisible Folk Club, a virtual folk club, wherein he often explores, often in cahoots with academics and historians, the backgrounds of and to our folk traditions. Here his cahoots include no less than Angeline Morrison and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, each fast staking claims in the annals of a black Britain hitherto undiscovered or forgotten, together for Morrison’s ‘The Sorrow Songs’ and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne as part of Reg Meuross’ ‘Stolen From God’ project."
'Stolen from God' - Reg Meuross: "... in Stolen From God, he has unquestionably written his masterpiece in a song cycle that turns an unflinching eye on the toxic legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, especially in his home in the South West of England. Shocked by his realisation of his ignorance of British Black History, of the Empire and how so many of the nation’s grand estates and lauded figures were tainted by the stain of slavery that had served as the foundation for their wealth and public acclaim. Embarking on four years of in-depth research into family trees, church records, and oral histories passed down through generations and uncovering many uncomfortable long-hidden truths in the true tradition of folk music, he has turned these into songs about seafaring, war, class, politics and social history with subjects that range from how naval legends like Sir Francis Drake and John Hawkins who helped to establish the transatlantic slave trade, how it underpinned the British economy of the17th century, the first petition to abolish slavery that originated in Bridgwater and Edward Colston, the Bristol merchant, entrepreneur and philanthropist finally revealed as being involved in the forcible kidnapping and transportation of some eighty thousand Africans."
'Wild God' - Nick Cave: "His latest album reminds me of Julian of Norwich’s work; baffling, subversive, mystical, rooted in a truth that can’t be proven. A truth he wouldn’t be interested in proving, anyway. It, too, swerves ‘rightness’. It, too, refuses to dilute the oddness of faith. It, too, is irresistibly intense ... This is not a casual album. Any true Nick Cave fan would scold me for ever expecting it to be. The album is a ten-track-long ode to a Wild God who has met Nick in the darkest of places. Places, I’m sure, he never wanted to go. Places, I’m sure, he will never fully leave. Such a wild God is a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked. But Cave, through a combination of circumstance and intentionality, appears to have entirely shunned comfort. And so, he’s in prime position to introduce us to a God who will confound us. Julian of Norwich’s book and Nick Cave’s album are centuries apart – yet, somehow, it feels as though they have been made from the same materials: profound discomfort and raw wonder."
My previous Top Ten's can be found here - 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012.
My co-authored book ‘The Secret Chord’ is an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief. Order a copy from here.
My previous Top Ten's can be found here - 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012.
My co-authored book ‘The Secret Chord’ is an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief. Order a copy from here.
My music-related articles from 2024 include: Rock ‘n’ roll’s long dance with religion; A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics; Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us; Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs; James MacMillan’s music of tranquility and discord; Belle and Sebastian's suffering singer on the struggle and the hope; Emotive Beats; Pure Gospel/Mavis Staples; and Gospel Hopes.
My music-related posts from 2024 include: Methuselah, Amazing Blondel, Tom Yates; David Ackles, Chris Bell, Bryan Maclean; and Jesus Music - 1 & 2.
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Hothouse Flowers - Thing Of Beauty.
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