Joy and trauma

Among currently active recording artists, few release more new music than the progressive-rock veteran Neal Morse and the indie singer-songwriter Bill Mallonee.

Together, their releases number approximately 150.

In February, Morse, a Christian since 2002, released the worship album To God Be the Glory on Radiant Records. His Wikipedia discography lists it under “compilations and rarities,” where it joins 13 other titles. Last month he released his sixth official live album, the two-CD, one-DVD Alive Again (also on Radiant).

He also has nine official studio albums, over 50 “fan club audio albums,” and live and studio albums with Spock’s Beard, Flying Colors, Transatlantic, and the Beatles tribute band Yellow Matter Custard.

Only Morse maniacs crave all of his output. But there must be a lot of them. Huzzahs and the sound of many hands clapping greet each of Alive Again’s 16 performances, and the casual friendliness of the spoken bits suggests a mutual trust bordering on intimacy.

Morse’s fans also have stamina to spare: Alive Again’s title cut lasts 34 minutes and 16 seconds. Like most of the rest of the two-hour-plus set, it bristles with a heady prog-rock energy at the heart of which pounds the indefatigable former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy.

Changes of pace come courtesy of the keyboardist Bill Hubauer and the guitarist Eric Gillette, both of whom get brief solo spots, and Morse’s explicitly evangelical “Waterfall” and “There Is Nothing That God Can’t Change.”

An entirely different ensemble supports Morse on To God Be the Glory. But although it owes little to prog-rock protocol and Lara Landon sings lead on two songs, Morse’s Christian optimism remains at the fore.

So focused is he on the positive aspects of the Christian experience that if his music has a downside, it’s that new believers who make a steady diet of it might expect the dying to self and the taking up of the cross that awaits them to be a cakewalk.

Overconfidence has dogged Morse before. In a 2007 interview with Christianity Today, he questioned the orthodox definition of the Trinity because he couldn’t find it spelled out in the Bible and because he’d been convinced by a History Channel documentary that the doctrine-defining Council of Nicaea was “not a godly event.”

To his credit, he also admitted that he was no “expert” on the history of doctrinal development. But, whether by accident or design, the final song on To God Be the Glory, “Oh, for a Thousand Tongues” (not the hymn), praises only “the Father and the Son.”

Heterodoxy isn’t a problem for Bill Mallonee, even less so overconfidence. A “Christian pessimist” if ever there was one, his latest album is called Slow Trauma for a reason.

The songs aren’t all that slow. Mid-tempo is more like it, with gently chiming electric-guitar hooks irrigating the Americana aridity. But the traumas from which Mallonee yearns to break free are the kind that can retard time. The apparent endlessness of the dark night of the soul pervades even his most hopeful verses.

He strikes a nearly perfect dark-light balance in “Waiting for the Stone to Be Rolled Away”: “The brightest plastic flowers I’ve ever found / decorate the beds of the sleepers awaiting the trumpet sound. / You know it’s so hard to get clean, and it’s hard to stay that way, / waiting for the stone to be rolled away.”

That a thousand years to the Lord can be like one day is comforting. It’s the days that seem like a thousand years that concern Mallonee.