Canter Bridge

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

Under normal circumstances, rewarding a 5-star rating to a diet food is a sign of emotional imbalance or the pressing need to get out more.

But not this time. Continue Reading »

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

In the spiritually searching 1970’s of my adolescence, two men and a guitar burst onto the nascent Christian music scene with an enigmatic one-word label and a strange penchant for lapsing into Hebrew.

These guys were ‘Lamb’. They brought to their musical genre a Messianic Jewish angle that now seems almost commonplace, but which at the time was anything but that. As a teenager, I was taken by the deep currents of biblical ideas, biblical feeling, and biblical language that interpenetrated their music. Continue Reading »

Hector Berlioz missed the memo on the KISS Rule (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

It’s a good thing, that. Even better is the presence of conductors like the supremely attentive John Nelson, who give themselves and their formidable talents to works that might otherwise languish in abandonment, too far off the beat track for markets and beancounters to pay atttention. Continue Reading »

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

I Musici is rivaled perhaps only by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields when it comes to predictably crystalline performances of the Baroque masters. When I Musici, Felix Ayo, Heinz Holliger, and Maurice Bourge turn to Albinoni’s concerto repertoire, the outcome is never in doubt. Continue Reading »

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

Songs 4 Worship, Shout to the Lord is an anthology of conventional and well-known songs in the ‘Praise and Worship’ Genre. The value of this double CD set is its collection of twenty-two old (at least by the conventions of modern worship music) standards in one place.

The set does not break new ground. Rather, it presents many favorite musicians doing their signature pieces: the Maranatha Singers, Paul and Rita Baloche, Darlen Zschech, Twila Paris, Delirious?, Amy Grant, Rick Mullins, Graham Kendrick, Keith Green, Pete Sanchez, Jr, Joseph Garlington, Charlie LeBlanc, Ed Gungor, Don Moen, Kent Henry, J. Daniel Smith, Marty Nystrom, Ron Kenoly, and David Butterbaugh. Continue Reading »

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

Five for Fighting’s John Ondrasik seems finally to have got over himself and down to the business of singing about life. The result is a splendid CD called, enigmatically, ‘The Battle for Everything.’ It promises to endure as a mile marker in his career, to say nothing of the annals of good listening.

The album’s opener, ‘NYC Weather Report’, fairly lilts. Ondrasik’s irony seems less bent on anger venting than on description of life as a stranger, one passing through with wistful memories of places and relationships that failed but somehow cast their expectation forward into destinations that await the end of this moment in the journey. Back, yet somehow forward, to New York City. Continue Reading »