Reviewed by Alan Smith

The most memorable track on this mixture of electronic and orchestral 'seamless hour' of worship music is "Amazing Grace". There's one other tune I know, Graham Kendrick's "Amazing Love". So I suppose in one sense at least, this is a very amazing album. "Amazing Grace" pops up three times and some of the other titles crop up more than once into the bargain. It is a kind of bargain, too, depending on how much the ubiquitous Word (UK) charge for it. Producers Tom Brooks, Michael Coleman and Ed Lindquist make no bones about it - "something to minister to your spirit without. . . getting in the way of what you were doing." I'd have to go along with the fact that there is a growing market for this kind of instrumental worship. Indeed, my own albums (this is not a plug, they're not available any more!!) were a resounding success, bought by Christians who quite openly told me they played them whilst washing up, stuck in traffic jams and sitting on the loo. Musically, then, superb. Very - and I mean very - clever arrangements and instrumentation. An amalgam of electronic and acoustic which is probably fooling me for most of the time into believing that there are more breathing instruments than are really playing. It won't catch on in Britain, though. Any band who have ever played in public will tell you that it's useless trying to play anything other than what people know. That's why Rob and Gilly's 'Classical Praise Guitar' series is a hit and Grace Instrumental will not be.

The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those held by Cross Rhythms. Any expressed views were accurate at the time of publishing but may or may not reflect the views of the individuals concerned at a later date.

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