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It’s no news to most people that worship as a musical style is currently and has been for some time “in”--just take a stroll to your closest Christian music store and browse up and down the music shelves for a few minutes if you don’t believe me.  But it would be too easy and simple to be critical of this trend for technical reasons: It’s true that there are a whole lot of worship records out there.  It’s true that nearly every popular Christian Contemporary artist has at least one worship project shrink--wrapped and competing for your cash.  As Christians, we are called to worship God in everything we do, and if a musical artist wishes to sing openly about their love for God, then so be it.  There isn’t anything wrong with it; that isn’t necessarily the problem.  The real problem is: most of said worship music is too unoriginal and familiar, and sadly, Strong Tower is no different.

Strong Tower is Kutless’ third release and their first worship project.  It features eleven covers of mostly popular, tiredly familiar contemporary worship songs dating since about the mid-nineties and on, and two original tracks.  Most songs open with mildly interesting guitar riffs followed by tuneful verses, only to peter out and lose all their steam in choruses that are too soft, too dull, and too familiar too often.  The fact that the disc includes a hefty and appreciable thirteen tracks is ruined by the fact that nearly all of them are uninspired and uninteresting--the high number of tracks actually works against the record in this case.

I’m not giving Strong Tower a negative review because it is a worship record. I’m giving it a negative review because it is a bad worship record.  Artists such as Delirious and Rock and Roll Worship Circus have proven in the past that a worship disc can be openly praising God in its lyrics, yet still sound inspired and interesting musically.  Nor does Kutless lack talent--past songs such as “Sea of Faces” show a solid grasp of good pop/rock melody.  But as for Strong Tower, the disc epitomizes what makes so much modern pop/rock and worship music so derivative; it is easily consumable, it takes no challenges, it requires the most minimal--if any- amount of thought to grasp and understand it, and it is slickly packaged.  It does not stretch in any direction, in terms of originality or in song writing.  It will probably sell like hot cakes to the Christian masses, but Strong Tower only deepens the hole that popular Christian worship is currently in.

Jonathan Avants  3/14/2005