Fireflight
For Those Who Wait (Provident Label Group)
Reviewed by Robert Ham

Sometimes the best art is inspired by the worst circumstances. Just as she was gearing up to record a new album, Fireflight’s vocalist Dawn Michele learned that her brother was diagnosed with brain cancer. Michele poured her fears, frustrations and hopes into this new album. And with the rest of the band following suit, Fireflight has put together a collection of songs swimming with emotion, raw energy and an intensity that was only hinted at on previous efforts. 

Michele’s internal struggles are placed at the center of some of the album’s most urgent tracks. Buoyed by furious guitar playing on the track “Desperate”, she uses her brassy vocals to echo the concerns of every avowed Christian going through a trying time (“I know you hear me/won’t you give me a sign/I’m standing on a ledge/waving my hands/do you see me?”). By the time we get to “Overcome”, Michele has found strength in adversity, using it to bolster her faith.

What this disc needs is more of that spirit and less of cloying tracks like “Name”, weeping sentiments that bring the momentum that Fireflight has built up to a grinding halt. Some of these quieter moments work better than others (the album closing “Recovery Begins” is a particularly moving paean to “the darkness turn[ing] to light”), but when the band is so good at intense, slick rock, why would you want to hear anything else?

By: Josh Gloer

A crowded living room in Philadelphia once yielded the soulful sounds that only emanates from singing Gospel music. A woman sat behind the piano, and her friends egged a young boy to sing.

This living room became of one his first stages, where Japhia Life reluctantly agreed to sing, and his training to sing for the glory of God began.

Decades later, Japhia Life is about to drop his forth album, Nazareth, a collection of unreleased singles from his first three records. While some of the tracks have been posted on MySpace, this album boasts a truly unique compilation of this emcee’s work, including two never before heard tracks.

“This album is really an album of music that was made during a space and time where I was really trying to find a comfortable place musically, where I could express my talents with a good balance of quality music, balanced with faith expression,” he said.

It’s an eclectic mix, as these tracks span the course of his young career. Since he started writing rhymes, Japhia Life has been called a Christian artist, a hip hop artist, an emcee, and it’s safe to say, he’s had as many sounds.  He describes his first three albums in a range from 90’s classic to dark and emotional. His third album garnered criticism for being too “poppy.” (It was an album that ironically produced the biggest tracks of his career to date.)

“My style has always been an eclectic mix, just always trying to express myself and my growth and where I’m at, at that time in my life. I continue to grow, so each album is going to sound different.”

The projects were full, booming with passion and faith, and the tracks that didn’t fit with the final projects were too good to keep from his fans.

“It’s just a lot of different songs that I made when I was just really coming into my own and paving my own lane,” he said.  “A lot of Christians may hear that stuff and may want to work with them as an artist that’s actually in the Christian community. So that’s kind of what happened to me. Just kind of finding my way and saying, ‘Where can a person that’s a believer find a comfortable place that he can express faith, and what would that place look like?’”

And so the name, Nazareth was born.

“For me that place would be where Jesus would be from.”

But this isn’t just a slice of life from a budding career.

“I definitely want them to be impacted by my content, the things I’m saying on it,” he said. “Spiritually, I want them to be impacted by it. But also I just want them to have an alternative to the music that they listen to that’s secular, that they feel isn’t healthy for them spiritually. I def want them to have some songs that they can listen to that’s just good music, but at the same time, they can still be impacted by my content on a spiritual level.”

He claims this album represents his reinvention of faith, as it represents his own personal journey as an artist and as a Christian – two things, in his case, that go hand in hand.

“For me personally the balance is just having the freedom of expression as long as it doesn’t compromise my faith. Whether people label me as a Christian artist or just a hip-hop artist, to me, it really doesn’t matter, I am what I am. At the end of the day, you’re really not what people label you, as opposed to what you really are. For me that balance is just an expression of who I am as a person. A Christian is one of the things I am as a person. I don’t really have to label my music as Christian, but I don’t have a problem if people label me as Christian, because I am a Christian. People have the option to label me at their own discretion. I’m not concerned with the labels.”

Nazareth is set to drop in early March 2010, and his next project West Side Pharmacy is slated to follow shortly. For all the info, check out: http://www.myspace.com/japhialife.

———–

Josh Gloer is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. He’s been a writer on six seasons of MSNBC’s Lockup: Extended stay. He has also written for MTV, TLC, TruTV, HGTV and Oxygen. Josh has been a journalist for about 12 years, doing celebrity interviews with actors such as Djimoun Hounsou, Dennis Farina and James Marsden; and bands like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Orgy and sax guru, Carl Grubbs. Josh’s work has appeared in Filter, Car Audio & Electronics, Zink!, ITEM and many other publications and websites. He was recently honored to have his fiction appear in an anthology of LA writers, including Charles Bukowski. www.joshgloer.com

by Brandon Deroche,
Causecast Music Manager
(Guest Post from Causecast, check them
out at Causecast.org. Used with permission.)

Starting with last year’s Bonnaroo Music Festival, I’ve had the opportunity to conduct research with many of today’s top musicians by disguising it as interviews. While some of these conversations were focused on specific cause-related efforts the musicians were involved with, we also asked many of the artists the same questions, such as “Do you feel that music can be used as a vehicle for social change? Who has inspired you to want to be active? What is the biggest struggle as an artist in today’s music industry?” and so on.

The first question we’ve decided to share responses from pertains to the word peace.

Peace has been a common word used amongst changemakers, hippies, anti-war activists, spiritual leaders and world leaders. Peace has a symbol, it’s a simple hand gesture and has also managed to replace the traditional “goodbye” for many. For such a frequently said word, how many people are actually conscious of what it is they’re referring to? If peace is the goal, do we have a common understanding of what it is we’re trying to achieve?

At many of these interviews, I’ve gotten to ask the music community what the word peace means to them. Below are a few of my favorite responses:

Brandon Boyd of Incubus:

Slash:

Jon Foreman of Switchfoot:

Tegan and Sara:

STS 9:

Nneka:

State Radio:

David Crowder:

Mike Einziger of Incubus:

READERS: Let us throw this back at you: What does peace mean to YOU?

By Robert Ham

This latest album has one of the most direct album titles I’ve heard in a long time from a Christian artist. What was your thinking when you decided to call it Church Music?

I like language a lot. I think language is fluid. You couldn’t have put a record out like this 10 years ago and have people get the slightly ironic satire or at least understanding that we were aware of the strangeness of these words attached to what we’re doing. At the same time, it is what you’re saying. It’s very direct and stating the obvious. We’re writing congregational music even though it doesn’t fit universally in congregations. Nonetheless for us these are songs that we’re singing on Sunday morning together. If you’re coming from a more progressive setting you might think, “Ah this isn’t church music. Church music is more stodgy: choir robes, organs, that kind of thing.” If you’re coming from a more traditional setting you would hear what we’re doing and go, “Absolutely not. This is not church music.” I think what is beautiful about that is that there is critique available to all of us. We tend to think of everybody else like ourselves. And yet when you think of the global church, there are a lot of people coming from a lot of different cultures and the art and the expression coming from these cultures looks a lot different than our own. We like that two little words could play with expectation and hopefully in a positive sense could help people think about music in the church in a bigger way, including ourselves. That the Crowder Band could fall under that little moniker is fantastic. It’s cool that a couple of words could say that much.

Because you play these songs on Sunday mornings at your church in Waco, is that where you are trying things out and honing new material?

Most of the time, these things take shape there. We have the great fortune of having people that we live life with there that are kind to us. We get to see where things want to go. There’s a few on [the new album] that have their life just with the record. You stumble into things and things take you places that you wouldn’t have suspected so some of those pieces are new entities for our people as well.

This record is interesting in that all the songs flow into one another so it is this cohesive piece of work. How did you hit on that idea?

We did this world tour with Chris Tomlin and Matt Redman – folks we’ve been connected to for a long time. Knowing we’re going to do this Church Music record, we thought, “Oh, this is gonna be great. Maybe we can travel the globe and collect these songs and expressions from a lot of other cultures and have this album be a global church expression kind of thing.” Well, obviously it didn’t go there at all because what we found was apparently we as Americans have exported more than McDonald’s, we’ve exported our worship music. Because that’s all they were singing were these American worship songs! So then we started looking at the music coming out of these cultures. So we thought, “What if the Crowder Band was transplanted to Tokyo. What would our expressions look like trying to find an common authentic voice for the age group of people that we are giving expression for here in the States?”

So, we collected a lot of j-pop in Tokyo and in Korea collected k-pop thinking, “What would the local church sound like if they were to follow our model which is to throw your arms around whatever is happening in pop culture to find the common voice of the people that you’re in front of?” And when we get to Europe, the club thing is way way bigger than it is over here. What we started hearing were a lot of influences that were happening for the producers of pop music around here in the States, pinpointing the things in Europe that were influential on the charts in America. And one of the things we decided initially is that when you hear a DJs work, when they hit play, it a takes you on a journey from start to finish. The logistics of pulling off what they’re pulling off isn’t that difficult ’cause you’re talking about 5 to 10 BPMs one way or the other and keys are sort of irrelevant I don’t think they’re aware of music theory as much as we are. For us, we’re talking massive jumps in BPM and massive jumps in keys, so the actual pulling it off incredibly tedious. But we’re kind into that thing; the harder it is the more joy we have.

Do you think that you have been successful in attracting people to the faith through embracing popular music and culture?

That’s a little disingenuous. We don’t view at all what we’re doing as proselytizing. What we feel like we’re doing is providing people the ability to express or articulate a response to God in the sense of a corporate worship experience. We’re using music to say things back to God with. I turn to hymn writers and people who have written about the struggle how you do that. It seems like to [Isaac] Watts or to [John] Newton, any time they’re talking about what your role is and what you’re trying to accomplish, it is so much easier when you find the common language of the people that you’re in front of. And for us pop music is a no brainer. How do I on behalf of the people that I’m in front of articulate faith through music and it’s mostly through collecting sounds and finding out where we are as people. It’s pretty natural for us because it’s the environment you exist in you’re around all this music that shapes your sensibilities. Being on a college campus like we are, most of it is college radio and straight up pop music so it’s really natural for our expression to be what’s common among us. [W]hat we’re trying to do is to provoke response or allow response to happen in a way that’s authentic and not forced. That’s what’s been successful or at least the successful moments of music in the church have seemed to be, in my opinion, when the writers were throwing their arms around what was happening in popular culture and were in conversation with what was going on in popular culture rather than being cloistered and oblivious. So, it’s not an attempt to proselytize but what we have seen is that people from outside of the church, mostly in the mainstream media or even in the club environment, go “Wow, this is not what I would expect coming from a group of musicians playing music in the church.” I think that’s what we’ve seen interesting and surprising.

Would you ever conceive of making an album strictly for yourself and not for a corporate setting and what that would sound like?

I can’t even think of what that would look like. I don’t have a drive to do that in me. I just think about what we’re doing in such utilitarian terms. What we’re doing is useful and it just fell in my lap to be the guy that says something on our behalf in our community in Waco and so yeah I don’t even know. The stuff we’re making and the sound that we’ve got makes me grin and pulls at me in an emotional way, so I don’t think it would sound too terribly different. Granted the stuff that we are doing is so varied that I think if I were doing something, it would have as many twists and turns as this stuff because I get bored and need to find different ways to express things. I would suspect it would be similar journey.

Most people that I talked to when I told them I was interviewing you wanted to know about you changing the lyric of John Mark McMillan song “How He Loves.” Were you shocked at all about the response that happened to you changing part of the song?

No not at all. Getting the feedback immediately was unexpected. There was this division of people that felt like these are the greatest words that they’ve ever heard in a song in their entire life and there are people who are equally emotive in saying that these are the worst words I’ve ever heard in a song. I found myself all these bizarre conversation about two little words. Then I started to do some checking and some research on the Web and sure enough there’s all kinds of stuff about these two words preventing it from being in a lot of corporate settings and it causing as much of a ruckus as it had with us. There were two arguments that I felt were absolutely legitimate and worth visiting with John Mark about. One is that the imagery just doesn’t work. Again, to point back to hymn writers, one of the things they struggled with was imagery. To read Newton and Watts talk about the songs that they’ve written which have a lot of imagery in them they struggled with it because what you’re trying to do is find something that’s common. You’re trying to give expression to a group of people that brings them together rather than divides. Something that is common in our experience that would let us understand God in a way that’s fuller and that has more depth to it. And these two words seem to fail in that light.

Granted, John Mark didn’t write this thing for that purpose. It’s just his personal expression. And as a writer he’s successful because he stumbled on to two words that are probably one of the more provocative lines that have been in a song in a long long time and as a songwriter that’s a great success. But as a person whose trying to say something on behalf on a corporate entity it fails because it is not uniting, it’s dividing.

The second thing was a guy came and said, “I did some research and found this guy doing this deal on YouTube where he tells the story of the song. It’s pretty emotional, but knowing where the song comes from, I think the anthropomorphic language that exists in that line is unhealthy for our theology.” He said that if this is coming out of an experience of tragedy where this guy is trying to figure out what’s God’s role in this thing, our anthropomorphic language ends up with something sloppy and I think that this is a danger in a corporate expression. So, in talking with John Mark, I offered up both of these things, both of which he’s probably already dealt with. After some time, he came back and said, “Let’s go somewhere different with it and try to maintain the initial intent.”

I mean this song is about the love of God, and it’s not like we haven’t as a church explored the love of God before. But to find something that lets you rediscover and feel it and experience it in a way that’s similar to where you first were with it is unique and special I was determined that two words weren’t going to keep people from having a similar rediscovery. Because there’s something really, really special about the song. The only people who were going to be upset are going to be those who have already fallen in love with the song. They’re welcome to stay with the “sloppy wet” if that’s what they’d like. We’ll take the heat and allow the song to get a lot of places that it hasn’t gone before.

Did you ever consider just leaving the song as is no matter what people’s issues were with it?

No, not at all. I think of music in a different way than that. Maybe it’s because I come from a congregational setting where you’ve got a hymn like “Amazing Grace” that took 50 years to find its melody and the verses. Knowing that hymns are so fluid, it’s always going to take some time to find the right language for it. For most people it existed in a form that it was and people got to experience it and I hope that by letting it change and evolve, more people will get to know it.

Have you come up against issues like this considering the music that you play is so varied and is not your typical worship music?

From record one, people have said, “Hey this is a great record but these aren’t songs that you’ll find useful in your corporate settings.” Well, for you these aren’t congregational songs but for us these are all congregational songs. There’s an awareness that these don’t fit in a lot of places which is awesome because to point back to our world tour experience, it’s a disappointment to me that there aren’t more organic expressions of unique communities happening. That there’s this tendency to co-opt whatever’s happening elsewhere and stick it in to your unique setting rather than allowing the creators and creative types among your community and try to make something that’s your own. I understand and appreciate that it doesn’t fit everywhere and I would hate to think that we would feel any sort of need to be something other than just providing a voice for the people we’re in front of on a weekly basis.

Looking at your YouTube channel and your Twitter account, you guys put out a very goofy image of yourselves. Do you make sure that that sort of material gets out to balance out the depth of the message in your music?

You’re exactly right. You’re on to us. Early on, we felt like there was a tendency to ask too much of music. Talking about the fluidity of language, if I was to say the word “worship”, what would come to mind for most people is a setting of a lot of folks staring at a screen with words on it, singing and I don’t think that was always the case. That’s a recent phenomenon that that word would evoke that thought process. So it felt like we’re asking too much of music in the sense that you’re setting up the segmentation of our spiritual experience. When I think what we’re trying to do is involve the human in more holistic way and humor is a really easy way. People put their guard down. It just lets the human be more human and in the process you get people to be more human rather than posturing. If you can provide something that takes the legs out from under the initial pretense or posturing then you get to a more authentic place with a person. There’s an attempt to add irreverence in a thoughtful reverent way.

The other thing that my friends wanted to know is whether you would ever shave off your goatee?

I have! It was in the year 2000, just before midnight, and I’m in this little bathroom in the house that we had and I’m about to be the spiritual cleansing moment. And at the time I had hair down to my shoulders. So I got the Bic out and I went for it. Midnight happens and I come out of our bathroom and my wife sees me and…I had neglected to run this by here because this was a personal cleansing moment. But apparently if you make any massive changes to your facial follicles and any thing on your hair, this is something you’re going to need to run past your significant other because she said, “You put that back” and started feeding me all kinds of vitamin E and horse mane and tail and stuff. That’s the one and only time that that beard’s gonna go anywhere. I got in a lot of trouble over that.

By Josh Gloer

Theory Hazit moved to Portland, Oregon, two years ago because he needed a change. Having never been on a real vacation, he wanted to drive his kids across the United States, and show them a cross section of our country. He wanted to hook up with fellow rappers, Omega Watts and Wildchild to name a few. He wanted something new.

Two years later, the emcee has something new to share. Coming together with producer Toni Shift, the pair has created a super duo – Modern Marvels.

“Modern Marvels is basically what we’re all trying to do,” Theory Hazit, the vocals of the duo, said. “We’re trying to be our own super heroes and save hip hop. At the same time, I feel like everything I do is marvelous. Everything we do for God is marvelous, because God is marvelous.”

Serving God through the gifts they’ve been given is a priority for the pair, and the two gelled after working on the very first track.

“We just basically wanted to make some really good music, classic sounding music, without trying to make classic music,” Theory said. “A lot of the stuff Toni composes bring creativity out of me, forces me to be creative. Sometimes he’ll just make bangers and the stuff just comes out naturally.”

But that’s not to say that the construction of Modern Marvels was easy. It’s been three years in the making. Theory thought it was completed in September of 2008, but decided not to release it.

“The more I held on to this record, the better it got.” Tracks were removed, and others added. Another year of work went into the album. Finally, late in 2009, Theory and Shift is ready to release what they call the “genesis” of Modern Marvels. “I’m in love with the album again,” Theory said. “It’s a banging album now. I’m proud of it.”

Some of his pride might come from the unusual depths he admits to going to.

“Its really personal, for me,” Theory said. “I always write personal stuff, but I’m really transparent on this album.”

Modern Marvels covers topics Theory says have been overlooked. The joys of marriage and raising kids, solving personal problems with love and being a grown man providing for a family to name a few.

“There’s not much talk about love. People are just out to get theirs,” Theory said. “Life has its ups and downs and there’s nothing perfect around it. Focusing on God, and relying on God… that helps you to endure the struggles and obstacles that come your way.”

Theory wants to teach people through his sucuesses and failures and he’s had no problem airing his shortcomings on the album. He said he hopes it will be a guide, a light to show others how situations can be handled.

“When people hear this album… I really want them to learn from it. I have a gang of mistakes on the record, basically teaching lessons on that. I want people to react and take it in and apply it. The message of the album is creativity. Creativity is not dead, especially doing it unto God. Doing it with God.”

While the powers that be are keeping the release date under wraps, expect Modern Marvels to hit the shelves sometime this winter. For now, check out the title track featuring Wildchild and Lightheaded at: http://bit.ly/2mbaTP.

———–

Josh Gloer is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. He’s written six season of MSNBC’s Lockup: Extended stay. He has also written for MTV, TLC, TruTV, HGTV and Oxygen. Josh has been a journalist for over 12 years, doing celebrity interviews with actors such as Djimoun Hounsou, Dennis Farina and James Marsden; and bands like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Orgy and sax guru, Carl Grubbs. Josh’s work has appeared in Filter, Car Audio & Electronics, Zink!, Item and many other publications and websites. This fall, his fiction is scheduled to appear in an anthology of LA writers, including Charles Bukowski. www.joshgloer.com

By: Josh Gloer

Say the words “Christmas Album” and you’re likely to invoke less than positive reaction. Lounge style rehashes of the same old tired “Classics,” laid down for the almighty dollar, these albums generally run the gamut from dull to dreadful.

Enter Family Force 5.

In early October, the boys of FF5 dropped a Christmas album of their own. Simply called Christmas Pageant, the album knocks the dust off the cliché and offers some music to truly be merry about.

Old standbys like “T’was the Night before Christmas,” “Little Drummer Boy” and “Do You Hear What I Hear” get run through the grinder and come out mean, dirty and surprisingly fun to listen to. Some tracks grind while others thump, but none of them resemble anything you’ll hear at the shopping mall. Finally… some Christmas music that’s worth adding to the wish list.

The album also boasts the band’s own interpretation of the story of the three wise men. In “The Baby,” the majestic trio hales from the ATL and showers the baby like only kings from the “Dirrrty South” can. Front man Solomon Olds’ own baby makes his vocal debut on the track (his wife appears on another), making it truly a family affair.

Check out the tired Christmas CD’s you’ve got on the shelf. If you want to get into some Christmas crunk, show off a holiday hip hop routine or just keep grandpa up past nine, drop Christmas Pageant into your rotation – its about time. 

By: Josh Gloer
 

Akron, Ohio. The former Rubber Capital of the world. It’s the home of the ice cream cone, hamburgers and caramel corn. Visitors here can see the world’s largest model train in the city that stakes claims on famous residents like Angie Everhart, Hugh Downs and Devo!

It’s no surprise that Akron, however, is not known for a budding young hip-hop scene.

“The hip hop scene is pretty dry in Akron.”

But its fitting that 24hits (Steve Bader) hails from the City of Invention. It might not yet be a household name, but its one that carries with it, a heavy message. October 20th marked the date that 24hits, along with DJ 2 Snaps, dropped his album The Grey Area – and his message was quickly downloaded to computers across the country.

“It’s basically like the elephant in the room,” Bader said of his album. “If you’ve met a Christian who really turned you off from Christ its kind of letting you know that that’s not what its about. It was something that, a topic that I felt didn’t have a representation as far as like the church and the kind of like messed up stuff that it does, and if there’s a representation that speaks out about that its not really a Christian perspective.”

His message may be controversial, but his intention was never to make waves. He’s clear about one thing – he’s trying to help.

“I didn’t want to piss anybody off and make diss records about the church,” Bader said, “but I think it covers the extremes that people get carried away with and kind of put in place of what’s really supposed to be the reason that we all get together and the reason we even congregate – just to share the love of Christ and to worship the savior.”

His goal is to reach out and grab those people who’ve been jaded, or turned off from the church.

“Anything that a non – Christian would look at the church and say this is what I don’t like about the church, I think it covers those things in a loving way. But also doesn’t shy away from the fact that we’re all sinners and we all need Christ.”

He’s constantly asking hard questions in his tracks.

“Why is it that we would get together and hurt each other?” He asked. “Why would we put laws on something that has nothing to do with what the scriptures are?”

Questions that may have no answer.

But Bader continues to ask. The producer has a unique approach when it comes to music. Raised in a home where all things secular were frowned upon, his exposure to music was very limited.

“I wasn’t allowed to listen to music,” Bader said. “It was pretty much hymnals, maybe a little Sandy Patti if I was lucky. But I ate that stuff up because I loved music.”

Bader remembers the first time he heard Hip Hop. It was during the credit sequence of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie, and he listened to it over and over until he wasn’t allowed to listen anymore. He was hooked.

“Maybe it was just the fact that I had to do without it for so long that made me love it so much.”

Bader was later nearly expelled from his Christian school for having a DC Talk tape in his locker. Now, music has become his life, his vehicle to explore the deep crevices of life. He invites you to do that with him, and experience The Grey Area.

“I don’t think this is an album that everyone is going to enjoy,” Bader said. “I think there’s a certain group of people and a scatter group of people that have been turned off by the church or hurt by the church and I think if they got their hands on it they’d kind of feel that somebody else knew what they were going through. It would kind of maybe give them hope.”

For a free download of The Grey Area, go to: http://www.moongardenrecordings.com/.

For more information on 24hits, check out: http://www.myspace.com/24hits

———–

Josh Gloer is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. He’s written six season of MSNBC’s Lockup: Extended stay. He has also written for MTV, TLC, TruTV, HGTV and Oxygen. Josh has been a journalist for over 12 years, doing celebrity interviews with actors such as Djimoun Hounsou, Dennis Farina and James Marsden; and bands like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Orgy and sax guru, Carl Grubbs. Josh’s work has appeared in Filter, Car Audio & Electronics, Zink!, Item and many other publications and websites. This fall, his fiction is scheduled to appear in an anthology of LA writers, including Charles Bukowski. www.joshgloer.com

By: Josh Gloer

Haunting, dark, gritty, angry… not words that can often be used to describe a Christian album. Maybe its time. 

The Grey Area, from the mouth and mind of 24hits and Dj 2 Snaps is all of the above, shattering stereotypes as it delivers a poignant message – we’re all sinners, we all need Christ. 

The album comes in two different forms – in a hand made sleeve or as a free download – but don’t for a minute think that signifies lack of talent or authenticity. These tracks are raw, real and ready to turn heads. Tracks roll from monastery like drones to the screams of heavy metal and back again. Just when you think you feel the onset of predictability, it changes – never failing to surprise.

One thing doesn’t surprise – each track is more passionate than the last, too dark and disturbing to turn off. 24hits’ desire and drive seeps through the speakers with every thump, making the entire album have more feeling than anything I’ve heard in a long time.

Well worth the free download: http://www.moongardenrecordings.com/

By: Josh Gloer

It’s February, almost a full calendar stretch until Christmas. Stockings are packed in boxes, next to bubble wrapped nativities and knotted strands of twinkle lights. The holidays lie dormant, waiting to be unearthed ten months from now. Right?

Wrong.

For Family Force 5, February was the time the band decided to start working on the most upbeat and unconventional holiday album to hit the shelves since… ever.  And in early October, the band’s hard work paid off as their Christmas album, Christmas Pageant finally hit the shelves.

“We decided to make a [Christmas] record because we were tired of listing to the same old Christmas music that we’ve always listened to for the last 80 years of our lives,” Solomon “Soul Glow Activatur” Olds, the band’s front man, said. “This one you pop in, and I think its very unexpected and refreshing to hear.”

Recycled, remixed and revamped, holiday favorites like “Angels We Have Heard on High,” “Carol of the Bells” and “T’was the Night Before Christmas” fill the track list along with a FF5 holiday original entitled, “The Baby.”

“That track originally developed from trying to do a version of ‘We Three Kings,’” Olds said. “We thought why not do it our way and make the kings gangstas from ATL, bringing silver and gold and have them talking about it in their Cadillac.”

Appropriately, Christmas Pageant was born in motion. The band recorded tracks while on tour in Atlanta, Nashville and  the UK. Some of it was even laid down in a portable recording studio in the back of the band’s tour bus. It’s a blend of dance, “ghetto”, upbeat and infectious twists on the timeless tracks American’s associate with Christmas. But, get one thing straight — this isn’t your momma’s Christmas album.

“We wanted to create a Christmas album that you could throw on at a part, or rock at a club,” Olds said.  “Have a Christmas dance party with eggnog and all that – all the Christmas shenanigans that go on.”

According to Solomon, the album gets back to the band’s dirrrty ATL roots, straying from the dance licks of their last album, Dance or Die. But that doesn’t mean this album is falling back into old and stale territory as they boys of FF5 combine gangster and grunge.

“A lot of people expect us to do different twists on music,” Olds said. “Our fan’s are loving it. We’ve got ‘glee’ and ‘jolly’ written all over us.”

And keeping with the Christmas Spirit, Christmas Pageant is a family affair. Of course, the ranks of FF5 posess three brothers, but several tracks boast Jerome Olds, the Olds brother’s dad, Olds’ wife under the moniker “Lalipop,” and his baby exercising his young vocals on “The Baby. 

For more info on the Christmas Pageant show schedule, check out the band’s MySpace page at: http://www.myspace.com/familyforce5.

And remember, for FF5 fans, it’s never too early for Christmas.

“It’s been Christmas all year for us. It’s an overload on Christmas, but it was a very fun album to make.”

By: Andy Dudynsky

Emery was one of the first bands to hit Tent 7 on Friday at Rev Gen 2009- which attracted a small group of lucky fans who got a chance to learn about how the band came together, and what it means to have Christ in their lives.

The guys from Emery started in Church choir, growing up in a Christian atmosphere and singing through high school. “We didn’t start playing guitar until college” mentioned guitarist Devin Shelton.

Toby Morrell (Bass/Vocals) helped explain Emery’s message. “We write about relationships with family, God, and people you dislike.  It’s usually a whole bunch of things that can happen in relationships. You can be blessed, hurt, etc.”

When asked about their main influences, the guys mentioned “50’s and 60’s rock n’ roll”, which had deep meaning with the lyrics.  They explained how the music from this time period generally came across as happy, but there was an undertone that not everything was necessarily going to last.  Toby mentioned that he enjoys finding multiple meanings in music.  Also on their list were Queen and Weezer, and a lot of indie rock.

Now in their ninth year as a band, one fan asked how they stay creative while creating new music. “We rely on each other” mentioned Toby.  He went on to say that they all contribute to writing, and if one person is stuck, they might ask another for help, or to hear some old stuff they’ve written for inspiration.  Their main motivation to write music is that they love it, and want to be real for their fans.  They feel a need to be honest with people – and to be able to relate to them, which is why the focus on relationships of all kinds.

“We get caught up in our lives, and there’s constantly a daily struggle of “Jesus is Lord vs. ME.”  Toby added that last week he dropped his brand new iPhone, and he and his wife both screamed and looked at one another. “I wish I could be as devastated about a homeless person, or something that really matters.” He closed by saying that “Everything gets better with Jesus in my life.”

Emery shared similar messages to their fans, drawing a huge crowd in a lively set that include both new and old material.

You can check out Emery and their new album “…In Shallow Seas We Sail” at emerymusic.com.