Organic Family Hymnal
Artist: Rend Collective Experiment
Label: Survivor Records
Time: 13 tracks / 61 mins

Being suspicious of hype, I was in two minds about what to expect of this début disc, as there were hints from their label that this would be their band of the year, and they have already been booked for a run of UK festivals over the summer. The hype was based around their fresh new approach. “Hard for a new band to be fresh, when most recorded Christian artists are as interested in artistic content as Hitler was in taking a pilgrimage to the Holy Land,” I hear you mutter. My mutterings were similar.

When I first heard it, although my ears were attuned to pick up the jargon (why did such an otherwise great track have to be called “Exalt”?) I missed the freshness in many lyrics. How’s this for an honest, down-to-earth, yet image-driven verse, that capture a sense of purposeful direction:

I wanna soar with you upon wings like eagles’,
But I’ll crawl too, when the dark and lonely questions come.
I wanna float with you ­ the current’s driving me,
But I’ll paddle hard, too, when the waves and rapids overcome.

What first hits the back of the ear is a sonic mash of artists like David Crowder *Band, Fleet Foxes and Sigur Ros. Crowder himself brings his distinctive vocal to “Faithful.” Some tracks sprawl as much as the onstage band (there is more than half a Polyphonic Spree of them!) and these often build to a brass-backed climax. When that happens, the Sufjan comparisons are impossible to avoid.

It took a while, but their polished lo-fi rambling and dreamy work has really grown on me. Tracks like “Faithful” and “Movements” stick in your head for days, and bring with them a taste of organic, real, community-based faith. Like life, their work can drift from the mundane to the epic in no time. When they are quiet, such as on “You Are Love,” they only need a picked acoustic guitar, but their wispy choir floats in angelically over the top. Some of the ringing sounds could be guitar, keys or bells in places, but what matters is the delicacy with which they treat the sound.

Two hymns appear near the end. The Collective's versions of “Love Divine” (tender, rather than bombastic) and “Thine Be the Glory” (which owes a distinct debt to David Crowder) are distinctively their own, both the tunes to the whole feel of the pieces, and fit seamlessly with their self-penned tracks.

This is a début disc, and there is still room for improvement. Their songwriting, while generally strong, is also erratic. So while “God is Near” and the spirit-touching “You are Love” have a superb devotional ambience, sandwiched between them “Above Everything Else” shoe-horns jargon into a melody where the words do not naturally scan.

Their label must be overjoyed to have found a band that picks up on the current hunger for organic, pastoral, acoustic-flavoured material, and there is clearly enough talent here to keep them busy for some years. Sufjan fans are very likely to love this.

Derek Walker

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Just like CCM is more defined by lyrics than musical elements, the same goes for praise & worship music. And yes, it's already been several years since I've heard publicists make distinctions between CCM and P & W. If you want to split the difference and say that P & W is a subset of CCM, that's reasonable, too.

Anyway, new co-ed English band Rend Collective Experiment praise, and they worship. And they do it with a distinctly British air. Depending upon the picture, there is anywhere from 6 to 11 of them. Maybe more? Add the school choir they use on occasion and instrumentalists not listed among their singers, and it is definitely more.

A rich sound? Yes, even without the school kids (which is most of the time). Horns, classical strings, rock band instruments and piano -plus more I may be missing-mingle to form a sound not dissimilar to North American indie darlings The Arcade Fire and Bright Eyes. RCE use the elements as well to recall 1960s-70s mainstream pop from their island homeland (I'm thinking certain Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield records, Chad & Jeremy and Peter & Gordon, too), but with an often softly busy production to complement their strong, sometimes nearly shouty vocals. there is as much here for congregational singing as there is for listening to a quirky, slightly rambling pop album, like Danielson Famile with smoother vocals and melodies or The Polyphonic Spree without the silly robes and with more sacred lyrics.  

Lyrically, they can derive inspiration from classic hymnody, but not in the way Chris Tomlin sometimes take a public domain oldie and folds his own bridge into it. Like their album title proclaims, they go on about things more...organically. That is to say, they incorporate the older vocabulary of their praising & worshiping fore-bearers into their own verbiage that speaks some greater theological/doctrinal insight than some of their competition (though these folks don't seem the types that would view anyone as that). When they go on about "God's dreams," I get a mite leery, but otherwise, they go at their ministerially musical work with a keenness of focus that newbies to the field would do well to draw inspiration from.

Though now only a U.K. release, Organic Family Hymnal is set for U.S. release later this year. I predict it will either make an immediate splash or its songs will seep their way into church song lists over the course of years, as seemed to happen with the more enduring work of RCE's predecessors in rocky Brit P & W, Delirious. With their refreshing approach on so many levels and a peculiar mix of friendliness and mystery about their, ahem, collective persona, merely ignoring RCE doesn't seem to be an option.    

Jamie Lee Rake