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   Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready.... |
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Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready.... |
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The Beauty of the Unknown Artist: Justifide Label: Ardent Records (2002) Length: 11 Tracks (39:24 minutes) It must be a difficult thing, indeed, for new artists to appropriate the spirit and intent of their musical influences without tumbling down the slippery slope of outright plagiarism. Like Life Outside the Toybox before it, Beauty of the Unknown, the sophomore project from Phoenix teen trio Justifide, adheres fairly closely to the P.O.D. and Creed-inspired sonics that populated the debut. The soaring "Face to Face" opens things in fine form with a sludgy, yet melodic hard rock workout. The equally stirring "As It Feels Good" jostles the formula a bit, injecting elements of King's Xian progressive rock and Lifehouse-like modern pop/rock. And the shimmering harmony vocals of "Pointing Fingers" work as an ideal garnish for the group's mostly hard-hitting musical inclinations. Despite its strong opening volley, the Beauty album features more than its share of glitches. "Someone to Blame" sports an impressive array of guitar chops, but flounders for lack of memorable hook or melody. In the same way, "Anymore" comes across as merely a collection of entries from the canonic riff catalog cut and pasted together in the hopes of forming a song. The slightly reggaefied "Escape," with its "brand new place called Zion" wording, borrows far too literally from P.O.D.'s "Set Your Eyes to Zion." And lines such as "Take your stupid rock star dream and run away, cuz I don't need you anymore" point out the band's ongoing lyrical struggles. For those simply wanting to put a CD into the player and crank it up to eleven to bang their heads or mosh, Beauty will probably work probably work as well as the next disc. And, to be fair, hard music fans shouldn't levy too stiff a fine on the youthful Arizona threesome for their overly close approximation of the Creed and P.O.D. sounds, particularly in light of the fact that they're hardly the first group to travel that road. Listening to Beauty of the Unknown from start to finish, though, one can't help but realize that too many other artists have pulled the feat off far more convincingly. Bert Gangl 12/2/2002
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