Another year, another terrible Kutless album. Oh wait - except this year, we get two! Oh joy!

Clearly subscribing to the theory that quantity beats quality, this band, a likely candidate for the title of "Worst Christian Rock Band Ever", has decided to fill in the gap between albums of original material (and I use the word "original" with more than a dose of irony) with a worship album entitled Strong Tower. I wasn't sure how to respond to this news when I first heard it. I haven't been able to decide whether the greater failure on Kutless's part is their shameless ripping from the styles of popular mainstream bands, or their almost thorough disregard for the concept of creativity in their songwriting. I figured that a worship album would likely mean that the band wouldn't put too much effort into writing original songs, choosing instead to follow the SonicFlood model of putting a modern rock spin on songs that were already well-known. And hey, that's gotta be an improvement for them, simply because they didn't write the lyrics, right?

Yeah, right. I'm looking back at that prediction and laughing at my own idiocy. This is Kutless we're talking about. These guys seem to relish the opportunity to do everything in an entirely straightforward and straight-faced manner. You know that somewhere deep inside, they're really serious and really excited about what they're singing about, but that excitement rarely actually translates to the recording. This approach actually got praised for its "ministry value" on their first two recordings, and I can see that making sense in theory, but in practice, this resulted in an oversimplification of the Christian life that often gave wrong impressions of what it was really like, and that basically insulted the intelligence of any thinking Christian who stumbled across it. As this approach translates to a worship album, sure, it's going to work really well for those who like to turn their brains off and sing along to repetitive and dull versions of songs that they already know. (There are a few originals, but they don't do or say anything remotely challenging or interesting.)

Now, is it entirely fair for me to say that? Does worship have to be a complex, intelligent, convoluted act? Well, I guess we can't fully understand God with our brains anyway, but does that mean we shouldn't try to approach it intelligently? Does that give us the right to maintain rituals without making any effort to think about why we do this? I can understand that for some people, beauty can be found even in meditating on the same old simple truths. But if that's the case, why bother repackaging the same stuff and re-selling it if existing recordings would do just fine? This isn't just Kutless's problem; it's the Christian music industry's problem in general, because it's a shallow and insulting approach to the concept of worship. Sadly, it's prevalent in a lot of churches today, and of course Christian radio stations are eating it up. Kutless is by no means a unique example, but their dogged determination to do nothing innovative or surprising makes them one of the most notorious symptoms of the problem.

What about purely on a musical level, though? Ignoring all of my little theological issues, and my tendency to notice where one band has copied another, is this decent music at all? At the very least, does it rock? Is it catchy? Sadly, the truth about Strong Tower is that it even fails on those basic levels. Many of these worship songs are one that I've known and liked for years, despite some of them being overkilled by other artists. Some of them have very strong melodies and so forth. But Kutless insists on rendering nearly every one in a sluggish tempo, sometimes packing it with half-hearted power chords in an apparent attempt to get some sort of slow head banging going (much like most of their original songs) and sometimes just painting over it with the most grey and nondescript musical interpretation possible. And if that's not bad enough, every song, despite only having two verse and a chorus and no bridge (most only have one verse, actually), must be stretched to the 3-4 minute length of a good radio-friendly song. So repetition is the order of the day. Some worship bands like Delirious? can get a good amount of mileage out of repetition, by ad-libbing and changing the tone or intensity of the repetitions, but these concepts are apparently foreign to Kutless. The best you're going to get is a slightly altered chord sequence here or a lackluster background vocal there.

So, to summarize, Strong Tower is a miserable, sniveling, pathetic, bottom-dwelling, scum-sucking failure of an album. That puts it on par with Kutless's debut, which means that the extraordinarily mediocre Sea of Faces (or, as I like to call it, Sea of Feces) is where the band has managed to jump the shark. Ah, such a proud legacy.

You can stop reading here if you want. If you're up for more hilarity, then by all means, continue on with the song descriptions, in which I'm not going to have much new to say from paragraph to paragraph, but I'll have a good amount of fun poking at most of these renditions for how utterly dull they are.

We Fall Down
Kutless wastes no time in getting into their doggedly serious comfort zone, making it sound like they're starting off the album with a filler track that should've gone somewhere in the middle. Here, they stake out a middle ground between their usual easy-as-pie power-chording, and the softer, piano and acoustic guitar driven sound of a song like "Sea of Faces". The song being laid waste to, which was written by Chris Tomlin, is intended to be mellower in tone, but the way Jon Micah Sumrall slowly wraps his voice around the words "Holy, holy, holy" in the chorus sounds a lot less like a cry and more like an awkward mumble to my ears. The fact that this seems long at three minutes doesn't bode well for the rest of the album.

Finding Who We Are
The first of a handful of "originals" on this album actually dares to take the tempo up a little, but it's a very straightforward rock-lite sound that has nothing to do with the hard/alternative terrain that Kutless had scoped out on their first album (not surprising, since they had already wandered away from it on their second, the music clearly being an afterthought for these guys). To be fair, this one actually manages to sound halfway pleasant on the surface, with one of the other guys doing a background vocal that adds a lot to the chorus. The lyrics have pretty much been said a million times in pretty much the same way before this song - "In You we're living, in You we're moving, in You we're finding who we are". I don't see much here that really adds to the sense of identity alluded to by the title - if anything, listening to Kutless makes me feel like I'm supposed to be robot instead of someone who God designed as a unique individual, so it's not surprising that the song offers no grand insight.

Take Me In
I have to admit that I've developed a slight affinity for the third track. I might actually enjoy it, though not for anything that Kutless did. This is one of those worship songs that I knew from back in the day, and I always thought it was beautiful in a haunting sort of way for its minor key mood and its language about being taken into the "Holy of Holies" that really allowed me to visualize the way the Jews used to worship God all those centuries ago. Kutless tries to maintain the mystical aura here by tacking on a Mark Tremonti-lite guitar intro, and to their credit, it sounds nice enough, and they even surprise me by adding a bit of a climactic feel near the end of the song by altering the chords a bit to keep the tension as they finish by repeating the last line of the chorus - "Take the coal, touch my lips, here I am." (I learned it as "cleanse my lips", but whatever.) Of course, they weigh most of the song down with their usual power-chord sludge, but just for the sheer fact that they reminded me what this song's title actually was so that I could look up the guitar chords for it, I guess I should thank them.

Ready for You
Kutless moves into ballad mode here, with sensitive-guy acoustic guitars and clunky programmed drums, and electric power chords that are played with slightly less force. See how versatile they are??!?!? I guess this would be another "original" song, but it plods along with an even more sluggish tempo than what we've heard already. Jon Micah slurs out his words as if he's having difficulty reading them off of the lyric sheet - and who could blame him for not having this memorized, it's actually got two verses! And a BRIDGE! Holy spumoni! I can applaud the intent of the song, about being ready for God to come and cleanse us, but sorry, you ain't gonna get anywhere with such banal lines as "take my heart and make it new" and "come and fill my soul". It's been said, so find a way to say it that will cause us to actually ponder what's being said instead of assuming we already know. On top of that, the chorus melody is uncomfortably close to that of "Draw Me Close".

Draw Me Close
Hey, speak of the devil! Now I know how they came up with that last song! Of course, that means that they have to somehow distinguish this song from the previous one... well, no they don't, this is Kutless we're talking about. But they try, by blasting us with more power chordage at the beginning, even if the chord sequence being used doesn't lead logically into the verse melody at all. It's just there for the sake of being there. We're treated to another routine run-through of an overused song, which sounded a lot more heartfelt and believable (if still somewhat drab) when The Katinas recorded it for Exodus back in 1998. Sorry, but this one just doesn't need to be "rocked out". It totally kills the mood.

All Who Are Thirsty
Well, hallelujah, it's a song in 3/4 time. That provides at least a little reprieve from the robotic and lethargic rhythms of most of the album. One of the guitarists (either James Mead or Ryan Shrout; I don't know which is which because it sounds to me like they're usually playing the same thing at the same time) actually makes an effort to be distinctive here with a semi-inventive guitar lead that kind of dances about to Kyle Mitchell's straightforward drum pounding. That keeps the song interesting for a few seconds until we get to the dry-strumming of the dull verses. I don't think that thius was a terribly interesting song to begin with - there just isn't enough to it. Hearing Jon Micah drag out these lines in such a sluggish manner doesn't help. The chorus, with its repetitions of "Come, Lord Jesus, Come", can sound very pretty in the right hands, if done in a sort of round or something like that, but of course Kutless has no knowledge of how to do anything other than play it straight and play it several times over. Jon Micah does manage to add another vocal line - perhaps his own little lyrical offering - that overlaps with the chorus later, so we've got a minute or so of a decent song in between the dullness. But as a whole, the song still buckles under its own weight.

Better Is One Day
Kyle Mitchell actually manages to sort of stand out with the slow drum march that opens this song - though it's more or less what Matt Redman's original did, and what several others have done. This is another song that can soar in the right hands despite its relaxed tempo. Kutless attempts to juice it up with - surprise! - loud power chords. So it sounds pretty much like what I thought it would sound like for so many months when I had it described to me by an ardent Kutless fan who promised it would knock my socks off and cause me to stop criticizing the band so harshly. Except that my socks are still on and I'm still writing this review, and this song still sucks. The music is decent to listen to - not mind-blowing, but not terrible. It's Jon Micah who jacks this one up. Hearing him mutter "My soul duth long" during the verses makes me wonder if this is the first time the guy's ever dealt with Ye Olde English. (Then again, it's always confused me how modern songwriters have used "Thee" and "Thou" in some places but "You" in others during the same song, but I always knew the line in question in this song as "My soul longs and even faints for You", so I don't know what this dude's deal is.) The really hilarious thing - perhaps the biggest head-scratcher of the entire album - is when Jon Micah chooses to sing the first verse again, completely forgetting about the second verse. I mean, it's like the guy goes out of his way to be as repetitive as possible. That, and he apparently wants to sound like a mush-mouthed Chad Kroeger (hey, it fits the Nickelback-lite musical style). Once the band really gets into it during the bridge with all the cymbal pounding and stuff (I like cymbals, Kyle, but you don't have to hit 'em on every dang beat!), the song sounds a little more powerful, but it still pales in comparison to Something Like Silas's take on the same song from last year.

All of the Words
Good grief, now Kutless is cutting and pasting from themselves. Exactly the same recording of this song appeared on Sea of Faces, and it managed to be the most utterly boring track on an already dull album. I'm not even going to dignify its presence here by going into any more depth than that. Next!

Strong Tower
Oh, hey, flashback's over! I can wake up now. Not that there's much to wake up for - just another bit of mid-tempo drudgery in which the band plays magnetic poetry with lines from their favorite worship songs. For a title track, this is a pretty abysmal attempt, never bothering to actually describe the metaphor that it uses for a title. (Who has time when you're busy trying to fit all of the other metaphors you've stolen into your song in a way that sort of rhymes?) The chorus ends up being one of Jon Micah's better vocal moments - I make fun of the guy's occasional dopey-sounding tendencies, and interviews have shown that getting inside his head is about as exciting as watching a C-SPAN special on paint drying in the Nebraska Capitol building, but his voice doesn't actually sound that bad when he puts some force behind it and he's not screaming. (Which he doesn't do on this album, thank the heavens.)

Jesus, Lord of Heaven
Call me crazy, but the airy acoustic guitar and piano intro sounds like it belongs on one of Third Day's worship albums. The picking pattern is actually a pleasant surprise for Kutless, even if it sounds too pretty to fit with their usual polished grunge approach, which takes over once we get to the chorus. Now that I think about it, this song is pretty much what you'd get if you combined "King of Glory" and "Your Love Oh Lord" and a few other Third Day classics, and just amped up the chorus for no good reason. Mac Powell could have written this thing in his sleep. Having said that, I wouldn't mind Kutless taking this direction full-time - they sound a lot better in reflective worship mode than they do rocking out to impress the kiddos.

I Lift My Eyes Up
Oh goodie, more sludgy chug-a-chugging on the guitars while the drums churn along unexcitedly. There's only so much you can do with a twelve-line, three chord song, and stretching it to three-and-a-half minutes and trying to make it rawk with a jerky chorus is not one of the advisable approaches. I could spend more time complaining about what they did here, or I could share with you a funny parody that I wrote. What the heck; I'll try the latter.

I roll my eyes up
Into my forehead
Where does this crap come from?
This crap comes from the
CCM industry
Creator of the bland

Oh, how I need one more
Recording of this song
Like a hole in my head
So I will wait for you
To show you've got a brain
But I won't hold my breath

(Repeat the above until you're blue in the face for maximum effect.)

Word of God Speak
Slowing things down even more than normal, Kutless makes their best attempt here to be MercyMe by covering the latter band's weepy ballad follow-up to their one good song, "I Can Only Imagine", as if we didn't get enough of this particular song when it went #1 on Christian radio for literally about half of a year. (Kind of easy for a song to do when there are like ten other songs on the playlist!) I don't know why anyone would like this as a clunky electric guitar ballad, even if they did like it as a clunky piano ballad the first time around. But then, some people don't give a rip as long as what they're getting is already familiar, so in that sense, it's easy to explain why Kutless would be so eager to cover a song like this. I suppose it's not often that you'll hear a thoughtful line such as "I'm finding myself at a loss for words, and the funny thing is, it's okay" on a Kutless album, though Jon Micah doesn't appear to be aware of the subtle humor and humility in such a line, which explains why the band opts for a dull fade-out instead of ending the song by repeating the line at the end. I made the comment once that if you combined Kutless and MercyMe, you'd get Building 429, so go check out that band if this sort of thing turns you on.

Arms of Love
Did you hear that sound? That's the sound of my dinner splattering on the ground after being expelled from my stomach. That's basically my reaction to this song, an even more shameless attempt to tug at our adult contemporary heartstrings than the awkward "Grace and Love", which was the total non-sequitur closer on Kutless's first album. This one takes "weepy strings" to an entirely new level, using them as the sole instrument in the song, so that we get yet another non-sequitur closer. I mean, it's a pretty song, if somewhat simplistic, so I guess it's not an entirely inappropriate approach, but dude, I thought Kutless was a band. This just further shows how much the guys are being poseurs by pretending to even care about the whole modern rock scene. Jon Micah is the only band member who does squat here, turning in yet another nondescript delivery of a song he might as well be singing in his sleep, and just to pretty up the song a little more, we get a girlish backing vocal that sounds like it's coming from a shy teenager from Kutless's church's youth group whose name is probably "Misty" or something like that. Whatever the case, the song is apparently intended to wield the force of about a thousand Hallmark cards, and it's filled to the brim with the sap from the trees that were cut down to make those Hallmark cards.

But hey, let's look on the bright side. The album is over. Hopefully I've done enough to scare you away from it ten times over, and if you still want to hear it at this point, then you must have a sense of humor about seven times as sick as mine.

Oh, and if there are any Kutless fans who had the wherewithal to read through this entire review, then I salute you. Bring the hate mail. You know it makes my day.

TOTAL WORTH:
We Fall Down $0
Finding Who We Are $.50
Take Me In $1
Ready for You $0
Draw Me Close $0
All Who Are Thirsty $.50
Better Is One Day -$.50
All of the Words -$1
Strong Tower $0
Jesus, Lord of Heaven $.50
I Lift My Eyes Up -$.50
Word of God Speak -$.50
Arms of Love -$1
TOTAL: -$1

Band Members:
John Micah Sumrall: Vocals
James Mead: Guitar
Ryan Shrout: Guitar
Kyle Mitchell: Drums
Kyle Zeigler: Bass

Website: http://www.kutless.com

Recommended: No