Since 1996
Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective
Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready....
Subscribe
About Us
Features
News
Album
Reviews
Movie
Reviews
Concert
Reviews
Top
10
Resources
Time
Wasters
Contact
Us
aLIVE in Florida
Artist: Rebecca St. James
Label: Forefront
Time: audio disc - 15 tracks/60:43 DVD 1 hr:21min.
aLIVE in Florida packs a double-dose of Rebecca St. James: disc one contains 14 live concert tracks plus one bonus studio remix track (“You Are Loved”), and disc two is the ‘Live Shoot’ DVD of the same performance, which took place at First Assembly of God in Fort Meyers, Florida, in March of 2006. This is a real bargain-package for fans of St. James.
For the skeptics out there, who may have written Rebecca off years ago, let me report that the little girl from down under has grown up to have proven herself to be a performer to be reckoned with. While she might have come off earlier in her career as a light-weight pop star, St. James has proven to be an interesting songwriter, and a performer with just enough stage-presence to make her live show a bit edgier and more interesting than you might imagine. This concert offers some of the best of her recent work and also introduces Joel and Luke Smallbone on one track.
Rebecca’s live band, which consists of Kevin Holvig on drums, Dave Childress on bass, Frederick Williams on keys, Gregory Everett and Scott Murray on guitars, and Joel, Luke, and Libby Smallbone on back-up vocals, handles the instrumental chores well enough to satisfy fans of the studio versions, but with enough aggressiveness to deliver a heavier edge to these songs. A really pleasant surprise here, and one that I wish more bands would try, is that many of the songs are performed with slightly (and sometimes radically) different arrangements than the versions we’ve become used to – too often these days, bands slavishly try to re-create the studio product, to the extent of using pre-recorded instrumental and vocal ‘beds’ and extensive samples to offer a carbon-copy performance of the studio track – by offering new arrangements in concert, Rebecca even renders the somewhat safe “Wait For Me” in a heavier, more potent style. Not willing to play it safe, we even get new arrangements of songs from her most recent release, such as the newly-acoustic version of “You Are Loved.” Joel and Luke Smallbone are featured on “Without Love,” a mid-tempo power-pop ballad that features the two brothers trading off vocals and singing harmony lines: they apparently have an album ‘in the works,’ and this sample indicates more than a little potential for good things from this duo. Another nice surprise is a powerful version of Rebecca’s ballad, “Lion.” which appeared on the recent ‘Narnia-inspired’ CD, but never on a Rebecca St. James album, and certainly never in a concert setting.
Never one to be shy about her faith, Rebecca lets her songs convey her message openly and obviously. There’s a worshipful aspect to many of the songs here, especially when St. James encourages audience participation in songs such as “Take All of Me.” If you’re part of the camp that doesn’t want your Christian artists to be ‘too Christian,’ then you won’t like this aspect of aLIVE in Florida, but we’re talking about Rebecca here – not Madonna. For a Christian artist in a concert environment, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone to see the artist express his or her faith, and here it flows naturally but not intrusively, even in the ‘altar call-ish’ “Forgive Me.”
The live concert sounds, well - live – the ambiance of the venue remains intact, even though each instrument and vocal comes across clearly in the well-balanced mix. Thankfully, it’s not cleaned-up and sanitized, but seems to be a true document of the event, warts and all (not that there are many warts). Even the older songs, such as “Reborn,” come to life with more of a raw, live energy that serves them well. The song selection and performance should be enough to prove once and for all, that Rebecca St. James is a female rocker with a respectable body of work to offer up in a solid concert – and this CD documents that fact.
As if the audio CD wasn’t enough, aLIVE in Florida includes a well-shot, energetically-edited video of the show, which includes essentially all of the tracks on the audio CD (except “Lion”), with more talk between songs, and including a presentation of Compassion International, which was wisely left off of the audio disc.
It might sound like a cliché, but if you only buy one Rebecca St. James CD, this should be the one.
By Bert Saraco
www.myspace.com/expressimage
expressimagephoto.tripod.com
