Reviewed by Tony Cummings

Adrian, with or without beard, is Europe's best selling Christian music artist. His concept albums are milestones, not only for the way they have found a strikingly diverse groundswell of support but because they've emerged from a creative vision which seems to pay skant regard to the vagaries of pop fashion, even the pop fashion of Christendom's wealth-producer (American Christian radio). This has created some particular marketing/radio problems. Some of Adrian's albums have patently failed to contain 'a song for the radio' while others have appeared, to the non-Snell enthusiast, dauntingly inaccessible. Now, with no hint of chase-the-buck compromise, Adrian has found a way of putting new immediacy into his music. 'Kiss The Tears' has several songs with a lilt and contemporary edge which will surely get US radio air-play (the delightfully undulating "Come Alive" for instance, with a chorus which definitely passes the old-grey whistle test. And the instrumentals, particularly the beautiful "Coverdale", are the stuff of which TV theme hits are made. The playing throughout is superlative, including some delicious acoustic guitar from Adrian, the lyrics, like Phil Thomson's "Bullet In The Mother's Womb", bitingly real, and the whole album a work of real maturity.