Seventh Day Slumber

I’m not about to rehash how many Christian bands have done strictly worship-music albums throughout the past couple of decades. Most likely you remember the good one’s and have forgotten the bad ones, so there’s really no need anyway. But the fact is they are inevitable. Every year another slew of bands and artists try their hand at taking the songs you hear every Sunday and wrapping them in a different package that will either be something compellingly fresh (ala The Insyderz’ Skallelujah) or completely dull.

Seventh Day Slumber have tried their hand at creating one of this year’s worship-a-different-way albums, and this one sort of falls in the middle.

Before you write me off as a hater, hear me out. Being as the idea of “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if so-and-so did a praise album?” is nowhere near original anymore, it falls on so-and-so to make something original out of the idea. Is it cool that a hard rock band takes ordinarily soft-rock praise songs and cranks up the distortion? Yes. But as Christian praise songs continue to push the limit with the style of music the song originates in, and your church worship band starts adding distortion pedals and DJs, what impact is a band going to have with an album if they just replicate what you hear all the time anyway? Sure, it’ll be so-and-so doing praise, but said so-and-so might just not be that groundbreaking to begin with, thus won’t necessarily be giving us something new.

That is essentially to say, Seventh Day Slumber isn’t UnderOath or Norma Jean (Norma Jean does the Matt Redman songbook anyone?) So, for their new album Take Everything to really be standout, the band would have needed to make a statement with their normally straightforward edge. Truth be told, they really didn’t. But that doesn’t mean it makes for a bad album.

Considering the awesome testimony of singer Joseph Rojas alone, you feel the emotion in his voice as he sings praise and worship to the God that brought him out of a drug-filled early life. Honesty indeed saturates the songs on this album. The opener “How Great is Our God” is heavy and epic in its delivery, though a little melancholy for the subject matter, but hey, it’s rock. “Mighty To Save” is also nicely toned and the jammy riff throughout fits the song, and elevates it to something a little different from the norm. And their version of “I Can Only Imagine” is a surprising departure from the incredibly over-played original, and it becomes darker and cooler for sure.

Without doubt, the band’s effort is noticeable through the whole album and can be commended. But there are missed opportunities with songs like “Lead Me To The Cross” which I thought for sure would have a powerful rock heavy chorus, and the band just made it sound like another high school worship band. And therein lies the problem with making a praise album. If you don’t make yourself different from the local musicians who don’t have thousands of dollars and lots of time for production on a studio album, then what’s really the point?

Other songs like “Surrender” and “Everlasting God” fall flat, generally for the same reason. And of course, it isn’t due to the lack of power in the lyrics, because these are some great praise songs, but the band’s delivery of them is just some heavy rock riffs enveloping the way the songs always sound.

One nice surprise was reading in the track listing a song called “Nothing But The Blood” which I was expecting to be the original hymn. While it might have been interesting to hear an edgy version of the traditional song structure, this one is something way different, and in fact, it is where the album triumphs. It’s a new song based on an old. It’s catchy and powerful. Bravo.

The album overall is very up and down, thematically, musically, and unfortunately in quality as well. It will make you jump up and down, then fall asleep, then jump up and down again. Say what you want about their single “Oceans From The Rain” that is now in heavy rotation on Christian radio. It’s pretty good, and it’s honest. But, from a heavy rock band, wouldn’t you something that pushed the envelope even just a little bit more? Such is most of Take Everything, but if you want to buy a praise and worship album, you could do a lot worse.

Tagged as: Seventh Day Slumber, Take Everything

↓ One comment

#1 cna training on June 29th, 2010 at 6:41 am

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