Copious Notes

David Crowder and drummer Jeremy Bush bring their church music to Southland Christian Church on Nov. 6, 2009. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

NICHOLASVILLE — Yes, it was the Church Music Tour.

And yes, the guys in the David Crowder Band showed up dressed in their Sunday best.

And this sold-out concert did in fact take place in a church — Southland Christian Church, to be precise. But it was also Friday night, and that was the spirit Southland’s visitors from Waco, Texas, embraced the most.

Danyew frontman Phil Danyew performed before the David Crowder Band took the stage.

Throughout its career, David Crowder’s group has made complete albums, and Church Music is no exception. The band’s October release is a thorough exploration of contemporary music styles put together in an arrangement that mirrors a mainline church service. But DCB doesn’t tour albums. It tours its hit-heavy catalog. Like his albums though, Crowder arranges those hits into a concert as satisfying as his studio efforts.

New quickly mixed with old Friday night as early selections included the Crowder classic and worship staple There is No One Like You and the disco-drenched selection Church Music - Dance (!). The latter was yet another chance for Crowder to show his love of gadgets, employing the T-Pain ap on his iPhone to achieve a vocoder effect several band members demonstrated — guitarist Mark Waldrop singing Sean Kingston’s Fire Burning and bassist Mike Dodson invoking the prototype Autotune song, Cher’s Believe. A few tunes later, Jack Parker had the banjo out for the regular Bluegrass barn burner  I Saw the Light and I’ll Fly Away.

We’ve particularly gotten used to seeing that Bluegrass bit at the Ichthus Festival, but one of the coolest things about Friday night was Crowder’s close proximity to the audience, allowing for the exchange of several gifts including a McDonald’s toy pony and a bottle of Dr. Pepper that had indeed been shaken.

Seabird frontman Aaron Morgan at the keyboards.

What Crowder gave back was a whole new way to think about church music.

The concert opened with like-minded artists Seabird and Danyew who gave brief, rousing opening sets. Seabird’s portion closed with the evocative, defiant anthem Cottonmouth (Jargon) and included a winning new single, Don’t You Know You’re Beautiful, from the Dec. 15 release Rocks into Rivers. Phil Danyew’s set energized the crowd for the headliner, in large part thanks to drummer Brandon Lozano’s tireless and nuanced work.

The David Crowder Band looking very dignified for its "Church Music" photo. Six Step Records.

The David Crowder Band Performs with Seabird and Danyew at 8 p.m. Nov. 6 at Southland Christian Church.

For David Crowder, there is a master plan.

That would seem to be a natural position for Crowder, one of the most popular Christian music purveyors of the past decade. But we’re not talking master plan in a cosmic, God is in control of all things sense. We’re talking about Crowder’s music. Specifically, we are talking about his albums, which have been custom-designed in title and content to follow a trajectory to … to … well, maybe we’d better let Crowder explain:

“I’m gonna geek out on you for a second,” Crowder says, when asked about the title of the David Crowder Band’s fifth studio album, Church Music.

“We’re in a three-record cycle,” he said. “We have three records, and then a second set of three records that are sort of mirror images or reannunciations of the first three records. Before we got into all of this, we had an idea for a seven-record kind of thing.”

Crowder grants that there have been EPs and remix albums thrown in. But for the band’s studio albums, they are executing the master plan of seven albums.

“We’ve been sitting on this title, knowing that it was coming as the mirror of the second title in the first three,” Crowder continues, referring to the band’s 2003 release, Illuminate.

Within all of this geekiness are things like number games: The first three albums were four syllable titles and the second are all three, because four plus three equals seven.

Out of all that complexity, the band has created numerous hits that contemporary worshipers know by heart, including Foreverandever Etc. and Oh, Praise Him. And writing songs for people to sing is, at its essence, what the band is trying to do.

But the structure, Crowder says, keeps them engaged and gives them direction.

Read the rest of this entry »

David Crowder*Band CHURCH MUSIC Intro from sixstepsrecords on Vimeo.

Review: David Crowder Band - Church Music

If this album were coming from any other artist, the title would rightfully lead you to believe this was a worship or hymns album.

But this is David Crowder Band, a group where nothing easily fits into a category.

The group comes across as very rootsy, but the music often sweeps over us with an electronic wash. Crowder has this idiosyncratic sense of humor, but his music and the message are delivered with incredible seriousness — he’s the artist who can take a stage with a keytar or Guitar Hero controller, joke about it, and by the chorus make you completely forget he’s playing a silly instrument.

Church Music is neither a collection of old hymns or easily digestible choruses. It is, in the tradition of Crowder’s Collision albums, a complete experience. There are songs that will ride on their own, but it is an album that is best experienced as a complete package and will take you in some interesting places like late in the album when steer into Church Music - Dance, a song that could have been played in Studio 54 in its heyday, and the blistering rock of God Almighty, None Compares. The album makes a progression from contemplation to celebration, like a well-planned church service.

David Crowder Band has a lot of great hits like No One Like You and Foreverandever Etc. But complete packages like this count as the Crowdster’s most satisfying work. Just revel in the contradictions.

Wondering how Crowder will handle this album live? Well, you can find out when Crowder plays Southland Christian Church with Seabird and Danyew at 8 p.m. Nov. 6.

Two concerts that we mentioned in recent posts have been cancelled.
■ Derek Webb, whom we profiled in the last rc talk, will not play Lexington next week. The Dame, where he was scheduled to play, has closed, and he has not secured another venue. Webb’s publicist said he hopes to schedule a Lexington concert later.

■ Starlit Platoon, which was scheduled to play South Elkhorn Baptist Church on Oct. 10 has broken up, so that show is scrubbed.

Phil Danyew. Photo by Aaron Redfield | Sparrow Records.

Review:

Future of Forestry | Travel

Danyew | Danyew

Christian pop so often divides into 3:05 teen pop, AC worship or blistering metalcore, it’s easy to get giddy when some terrific, thoughtful composition glides across the desk.

Give us two, and it starts to feel like Christmas.

Like the Yuletide season, the summer yielded a expected treat and surprise, both of which prove great things can come in small packages — in this case, EPs.

First, the surprise was Danyew, a new artist appropriately paired with David Crowder Band and Seabird for a fall tour.

The six-song, self-titled EP is the product of multi-instrumentalist Phil Danyew. Cleary, he’s trying on several ideas here in a debut that includes things like the jaunty Turnstile. But the tracks that make the biggest impressions are ones like Closer We Are and Beautiful King that build into airy acoustic-electric soundscapes.

With his sound, Danyew is playing in a park Eric Owyoung’s Future of Forestry has already been in for a while — and his old band, Something Like Silas, occupied before.

Forestry’s latest effort, the six-song Travel, finds the always adventurous Owyoung exploring new territories for his work such as the acoustic-based Traveler’s Song or gritty This Hour, which trades in reverb for distortion. The familiar synthesized tone is back with Colors in Array, and the overall package shows Owyoung’s skill as a song crafter and, dare we say, orchestrator.

The most satisfying thing about both of these short discs is they are the expressions of artists: something the marketplace does not always accommodate and something that is entirely appropriate in the context of worship.

CCM coming back, sort of: One of the worst decisions in the history of contemporary Christian music is being reversed, kind of. CCM Magazine is coming back as a quarterly digital magazine.  In 2008, the print edition of CCM ceased publication just short of three complete decades of publication. The move was tantamount to Rolling Stone closing up shop. Love them or hate them, both are the publications of record in their respective genres of music — or, in the case of CCM, we must say, “were.” Getting a CCM cover was a big deal for an up-and-coming band, and saved together in a rack, the magazine was a running chronicle of the genre. The idea was to continue with a website, but CCMmagazine.com has been poor and confusing at best. Lately, I have been following Christian music news through other sources such as Christianity Today’s excellent Christian Music Today website.

Earlier this year, CCM launched a prototype of the digital magazine to good reviews, so it is continuing on. The summer issue has Leeland on the cover and its 34 “pages” look much like the old print edition with a dose of Harry Potter’s Daily Prophet. The Leeland story, for instance, features a video of the band performing tunes from its forthcoming album, and there are similar touches throughout.

Does it replace the print edition? No. Will it be a worthy stand in? Time will tell, and it will be largely dependent on whether editor Lindsay Williams and her staff can put together a publication people eagerly anticipate because it’s relevant, useful and compelling, as well as cool. I hope they pull it off, because Christian pop needs a vital CCM.

Speaking of Christian Music Today, check out this excellent article on social justice in Christian music and how to keep it from just being a passing fad.

Ichthus has questions: The Ichthus Festival just put out a survey asking what folks thought of the festival this year and who they want to see at next year’s event. If you did not go this year, you can still answer questions about next year’s event.