Experimentation is a tricky thing for artists in any genre. In the cases of special bands like the Beatles to U2, messing with an already good thing can make the \u201cnow\u201d group a legend for years to come instead of merely a passing fad. After all, you may picture the Beatles as the lovable moptops of the early 60\u2019s, but when asked what their best album is, you\u2019re most likely to answer either Revolver<\/i> or Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band<\/i>\u2014and either way you\u2019re picking a change from the strict pop formula of Beatlemania.<\/p>\n
In other cases, however, change is not a good thing. I have no desire to hear an AC\/DC ballad about unrequited love, nor to hear a balls-to-the-wall rocker from Carole King. Sometimes, when the formula works, it should be stuck with and milked for all it\u2019s worth to save the group embarrassment and the fans money.<\/p>\n
David Crowder Band has a killer praise and worship formula\u2014loud, energetic, simple, and sincere. And they need to stick to it, because the remix album Sunsets & Sushi<\/i> is dreadful.<\/p>\n
First of all, I\u2019m not sure what they were going for here. Is it dance music? Is it tropical? Electronica maybe? They\u2019ve got me, because all I can figure out is that it\u2019s bad. The group has taken good to great worship tracks like \u201cNo One Like You\u201d and added funky beats, echo effects, reverb, you name it. It\u2019s almost as though David and Co. pointed at random buttons on the studio\u2019s sound boards and said \u201cI want that one, and that one, and that one!\u201d without knowing what they were pointing to.<\/p>\n
I confess, the randomness does come together in such a way that the songs remain cohesive, and for that reason this album escapes the dreaded F rating. Whatever style of music this was supposed to be, it\u2019s polished (but then, it\u2019s hard to imagine something like this in a raw form.)<\/p>\n
David Crowder, the band\u2019s leader and vocalist, has a good voice, but on this album it seems almost as though he was asked to sing four lines or so and let the producers take it from there. Each song is phenomenally repetitive (granted, a typical approach for the David Crowder Band), and his vocals are tampered with to the point that it\u2019s difficult to imagine him even attempting one of these remixes live.<\/p>\n
And as for the instrumentalists, the guitars are hard to hear, the bass is virtually nonexistent, and only the drums seem untouched by the studio gimmicks. Maybe I\u2019m too traditional, but if there\u2019s an instrument playing, I want to hear it over the backbeat of some studio machine.<\/p>\n
As for the songs themselves, each is difficult to distinguish from the one before it. Slow song, fast song, it doesn\u2019t seem to matter what its category was on Illuminate<\/i>, the album these songs were lifted from. The tempo never changes from song to song, and neither does the style, so the semblance of a tune and the lyrics are all that separate each song. Formerly entertaining worship tracks like \u201cRevolutionary Love\u201d and \u201cHow Great\u201d are reduced to clones, devoid of their original charm and replaced with bubbly, headache-inducing electronica.<\/p>\n
My final complaint is perhaps my biggest. David Crowder Band\u2019s typical forte is worship music\u2014they may be repetitive and they may be simple, but they know how to make a crowd feel the Holy Spirit. On Sunsets & Sushi<\/i>, it seems like their focus is gone. From what I hear on the album, they aren\u2019t singing and playing to God anymore, they\u2019re fiddling with their formula and their stardom to make a few bucks and see what happens. I\u2019m not saying they shouldn\u2019t have fun, by any means, and it\u2019s not my place to judge their hearts, but I can\u2019t hear the sincerity I\u2019m accustomed to from them.<\/p>\n
Illuminate<\/i> was an excellent praise and worship album. I recommend it to anyone looking for straight, catchy worship music. But if that album was a dove, carrying good news, then Sunsets & Sushi<\/i> is a mosquito\u2014no one knows what it\u2019s carrying, so stay away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":29405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8228],"rating":[11203],"class_list":["post-40977","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-david-crowder-band","rating-rating-d-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40977"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}