The Music

1 Long Line of Leavers Caedmon's Call

BEST CUTS "Ballad of San Francisco"

BEST LYRIC "I love anonymity and I love being noticed, / just the same as anybody else."

OVERVIEW Caedmon (ca. 670) was an illiterate herdsman whose miraculous transformation into a great Christian poet occurred overnight; Caedmon's Call is a Houston-based septet whose transformation into a great Christian band is occurring somewhat more gradually.

BEST CUTS "Adore," "You Don't Miss a Thing," "Escuchame"

BEST LYRIC None that are striking, but at least the clichés are true to life (i.e., "When I think You've finally given up, / You fill my heart with unconditional love").

OVERVIEW Consistently enjoyable, vastly preferable to the latest by Britney Spears.

BEST CUTS "Wilderness," "Forward to the Future," "Another Show"

BEST LYRIC "Tell me who will listen to uneducated congregants, / and why should they when all we have to say is / bumper-sticker doctrine and cute catch phrases?"

OVERVIEW The horns, although catchy, are a gimmick; the lyrics, although clever, stand out the most when they allude to C.S. Lewis or paraphrase Francis Schaeffer.

BEST CUTS "God You Are My God," "God's Romance"

BEST LYRIC "People all across the world / with a heartbeat for holiness / feel His pleasure."

OVERVIEW The praise that England's Q magazine heaped on the group's Mezzamorphis album ("Something of a rarity, this ... the Christianity is forceful rather than force-fed") holds true for this album too.

BEST CUTS "God Is in This Place"

BEST LYRIC None worth quoting, but this "Plus One Fact," from the group's website, is definitely an attention-getter: "One of Plus One's first performances was singing 'America the Beautiful' at an event for Vice President Al Gore."

OVERVIEW Proof of CCM's continuing willingness to board any bandwagon hitched to a gravy train.

Whether solo or with his brothers, Aaron Neville has never made a bad album. It should come as no surprise, then, that Devotion (EMI Gospel/Tell It), his long-awaited gospel collection, adheres to high standards. One might question the song selection-a couple of overfamiliar schmaltz classics, fine, but "Bridge over Troubled Water" and "Jesus Loves Me" and "I Shall Be Released" and "Morning Has Broken"? Still, it's by distilling schmaltz to its emotionally pure essence that the 59-year-old New Orleans legend has in large part made his name. Like Al Green, he possesses a uniquely soulful tenor voice that can make one listen afresh to stale material. The most revealing songs, though, are the two he wrote himself. "Jesus Is a Friend of Mine" begins with a spoken section in which he declares, "I want to see the world through His eyes, / I want the world to see Him in me," and in "What Would Jesus Do?" he revives the tired title slogan by setting it to music and by rephrasing it as a statement: "Let what He lived be your guide." Amen.