Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The Top Ten Albums of 2011: #2



#3: Gungor - Ghosts Upon The Earth

A lot of creative types - myself included - have latched onto Gungor as the "band that will save worship music from its bloated self-indulgent mediocrity." With David Crowder stepping down after ten years of writing creative, thought-provoking worship tunes, we need another band to rise to the challenge, and Gungor is that band. After their last release "Beautiful Things," I thought Michael Gungor and company had reached its limit of creativity and out of the box musical composition, but I was wrong because Ghosts Upon The Earth surpasses its predecessor.

Upon first listen I was honestly a little disappointed, because I felt the music was that disjointed and that different. It was like this band had decided to balance the worship music scale by stepping as far away from the stuff you hear on K-Love as possible, and it unnerved me to tell the truth. But the more I listened to this CD, the more I began to appreciate the lengths that Gungor was willing to go to give a gift worth giving to God with this music. Even the song that unnerved me the most, "Wake Up O Sleeper" has become my favorite song on the album, because I love how it takes what seems to be disjointed acoustic instrument playing, adds some poignant lyrics and a sweet melody and melds it into a beautiful song. It's almost like they decided to take the idea of the song Beautiful Things and express the same idea musically.

I almost put this album as number one because it is so ambitious, so audacious in fact - but #1 to me seems to be even more ambitious if not as musically compelling.

Standout singles: Wake Up Sleeper, Brother Moon, This Is Not The End

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