28 June 2013

Music Day

People, you need this band in your life.

I finally tracked down a copy of their album Incandescent and proceeded to listen to it four times in three days (with great restraint). Their take on the old stalwart church-organ hymn Sweet By And By is nothing short of brilliant. Let's see Matt Redman pull that off.

Unfortunately, Incandescent is not on iTunes and apparently a re-release depends on if they can track down the masters. So today I'm going to feature something from their second album, Escape From The Fallen Planet.

Title: Solo Flight
Artist: Crumbächer
Album: Escape From The Fallen Planet
Year: 1986
Label: Frontline
iTunes here; YouTube here.

It's not quite as intense as the stuff on Incandescent, but it'll have to do. I like the atmospheric feel of it though -- it sounds like something John Lawry (former Petra keyboardist) might have done around that same time.


Things that make this band awesome (or at least the album Incandescent):
- Two -- count 'em, two -- keyboards.
- Eighties music. Do I really have to go on?
- You cannot resist dancing to this music. Seriously. I dare you. Even the most hardened Baptist will find themselves tapping their toes to this stuff (and I should know, I was raised hardcore Baptist).
- They play at a breakneck pace and they do not relent for a minute. There are no ballads on these albums -- no namby-pamby fake sappy 'Christian love songs' to mess up a good record.
- Every song actually sounds different from the one before it -- a practice which apparently is sacrilegious today (heaven forbid we actually use more than two chords!).
- The harmonizing on a lot of their songs -- maybe it's just the male-female vocal mix, but it just adds a fresh, sparkling quality to the band's sound.
- This is such a 'tight' band. You just don't get such skill and chemistry together anymore -- nowadays it's always some 'worship pastor' and a bunch of studio players. These guys were amazing at what they did. Sometimes you listen to some of the songs and you wonder if they all shared a brain or something. Even on their first album, one wrong note would have completely messed up the entire song. But there are no wrong notes, even at such a breakneck speed. It's just fun to listen to them and try to pick out all the instrument tracks (I still don't think I've caught them all).



(You can listen to most (if not all) of the tracks from Incandescent on YouTube if you search the artist and album name. In fact, if you clicked the link to Sweet By And By above, you'll probably find most of them in the YouTube sidebar.)

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