Peaceful offerings

LAST ISSUE, this page featured three commendable out-of-left-field Christian albums for sale on Bandcamp and explained how to track them down. Here are three more, each stylistically distinct and each well worth its price.

First is the Kickstarter-funded Hymns for This World and the Next by Wes Crawford, an Austin-based, acoustic-guitar-strumming worship leader who describes the album as “Christian hymns—some with old traditional melodies and some with new melodies I composed.”

That it is. And you might wonder what the big deal is, given that others have trodden similar roads before. Well, those “new melodies” to which Crawford refers predominate. They’re also pretty good. And the ready-for-prime-time Americana with which he and his four-man band (plus two female harmony singers) put them across gives the lyrics, Victorian diction and all, an earthy contemporaneity. On the whole, the musicians mine country-rock’s peaceful, easy vein. And with the multi-instrumentalist Brian Douglas Phillips doing yeoman’s work on organ and pedal-steel guitar, they do so authentically.

There’s peace at the heart of God Never Fails by Houston’s Little Union Missionary Baptist Church too, but it’s more like the calm at the eye of a storm—a 30-voice-strong (judging from the cover), black-gospel choral storm recorded before an enthusiastically receptive congregation.

Most of the songs feature soloists, but it’s the choir even more than the splashily busy rhythm section that will have you up and moving. And once the voices build to one of their many climaxes, they don’t let it go. Changes of pace occasionally bring the intensity down to a simmer, as does the one-minute, 14-second “Sermonette” by Pastor Henry L. Fields, which begins, “The Bible has been called a love story, but it is also a résumé listing the success of God.” The church’s joyful noisemakers don’t sound as if they need convincing.

Worlds apart from either of the Texas offerings—indeed, from just about any other album that you’re likely to encounter—is Sweet Hour of Prayer by Queensbury, N.Y.’s Richard J. Ruggiero. “Beloved hymns played on electro-acoustic carillon,” read the words below the title on the cover. “319 bells in stereophonic sound,” read the words above.

Ruggiero, in other words, faithfully recreates the kinds of sounds that used to chime from church bell towers (and that in some places still do) on a daily basis, softly and tenderly reminding those within earshot that this earth was not their home.

So there’s nostalgia at work in the pleasure. But at least some of it is, to borrow a phrase from the late Steve Ben Israel, nostalgia for the future. And a very bright one at that.