Ah, the tribute record. Most of the time, these attempts by a varied and sometimes obscure groping of artists leave us thinking, "Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?" The idea of hearing new and sometimes modernized takes on classic songs by a favorite artist may sound really good in theory, but in practice, we usually get a barrage of B and C-list acts contributing to a massive train wreck of cover tunes that usually fall into either the "karaoke" category (i.e. singing the sing pretty much exactly as it was originally done with no innovation whatsoever) or the "necrophilia" category (i.e. wanting to morph the song into a style you're infatuated with so badly that you totally murder it, dig up its body, and proceed to further desecrate it in the process). Even worse, it might be one of those cheap "String Quartet Tribute" things which usually focuses on a Top 40 band whose music has no business being reinterpreted as classical music, or the entire tribute might be done by a single band that you've never heard of (generally for a very good reason). It's often a no-win situation for listeners, and a win-win situation for record labels who can convince buyers to pick these things up without previewing any of the material first, because they loved the original artist, so hearing new trendy artists redo the songs can't be all that bad, can it?

Surprisingly, the Christian music industry hasn't been doing a terrible job in this department of late. A few years ago, there was a tribute to U2 (interesting, including two members of the group being tributed on the album I'm about to review) that went over fairly well. Last year, there was a more obscure Michael W. Smith tribute that, by all accounts, should have been a total disaster, but I found the balance of it to actually be fairly enjoyable. This time around, the mega-popular dc Talk gets a monument erected to commemorate the genre-jumping work that this hip-pop-turned-modern-rock group has done, but in an interesting twist, FREAKED: A Gotee Tribute to dc Talk's Jesus Freak a tribute to one of their albums. Gotee Records, the label started by dc Talk member Toby Mac, looks to its roster to recreate the entire Jesus Freak album (originally released in 1995) from front to back, even (sort of) including the interludes. It's an amusing concept, bound to trigger strong nostalgic feelings in some, and pure, unbridled anger in others who have listened to the album more than enough times to know every little sonic detail of every track, and who will be extremely annoyed if the new version doesn't follow it to the letter. And then there are critics like me who think, "What would the point be if they followed it all to the letter? dc Talk innovated; these guys need to follow in the footsteps by offering new and different interpretations." For all but maybe the first group, a good 50% of this CD is bound to pale in comparison to the source material. What can I say? This is the rare album that's had every single song released as a single (granted, that's easier to do when it's Christian radio and when it takes you three years to get your next album out), most of them huge hits, and there are kids who love the record today even though they were like, 4 years old when it came out, and everything else from that era is probably way too old-school for them. (I was just starting college when it came out - boy, do I feel old now.) I suppose there's a fourth audience, who's never heard of dc Talk before and whose first exposure to these songs will be through FREAKED, but honestly, those three people aren't gonna make much of a difference.

The thing that works about this compilation is that, since dc Talk was a genre-hopping vocal group (ack, I'm talking about them in the past tense, does that mean I've finally accepted that the "break" they took in 2001 really was a breakup after all?), nearly all of the Gotee Records Roster of urban artists, rock artists, and whatever else will fit in here. Sadly, the initial appeal is somewhat diminished by the presence of a number of artists that I either haven't heard of, or have not heard much of their original material. I consider myself to someone who follows Christian music fairly closely, so if I'm not terribly familiar with most of these artists, that may be a deterrent to a lot of more casual Christian music fans as well. Obscurity doesn't make an artist not worth listening to, but dc Talk has been such an influential group that it would have made sense to go beyond the Gotee roster and pick up a few more heavy-hitters for this project, specifically other groups that owe some of their success and their existing audience to the groundwork laid by dc Talk (which was, in turn, influenced by lesser-known rap/rock hybrids from before their time, and a variety of mainstream acts as well, but they pulled it all together in a way Christian music hadn't heard before, and the wide acceptance of this was truly unprecedented). Even some of Gotee's early success stories, such as Out of Eden, Jennifer Knapp, and SonicFlood have called it a day by now (well, SonicFlood still exists, but in name only), but they would have been ideal inclusions. (I'd like to know what excuse Grits has for not being here.) Most of the artists present have been signed to the label within the last year or two, and a few don't even have their own albums out yet, so at times it can seem like a cheap way to hawk their own artists, using potentially better songs than those artists' original material.

Anyway, I'd say that this album's pretty well split between the karaoke, the necrophilia, and the innovative. There are a few really good arrangements here, unexpected takes on these songs that work if you give 'em a chance. Others are very easy to follow if you know the original songs, though they might seem a tad less energetic and full without those three familiar vocalists we've come to know and love intertwining and riffing off of each other (dc Talk was never a "band", because all three guys sang and Toby rapped, and none of 'em played instruments live or on their records, but they sure knew how to get the right players to back them up). A few are downright painful to listen to. For the most part FREAKED, it's a worthwhile purchase, both as nostalgia, and just as decent music. Good songs never go out of style, I think, and not every lyric dc Talk came up with was memorable, but the bulk of these songs have stood the test of time.

So Help Me God
First up is The Showdown, a band I've never heard of that seems to mix alternative metal licks with a bit of Southern varnish on the vocals. Consider them to be like a slightly more accomplished Day of Fire. Strangely, the song starts off with the same warped sound sample that began the original Jesus Freak, record, but not "I got something for ya, man!" and no peppy "Ba ba ba"s at the beginning of the song. The grittier approach fit's the song well enough, until they get to the chorus, which just doesn't seem to have the urgent energy of the original, despite how passionate the lead singer's growl is - the music just doesn't create the same wall of sound that dc Talk's backing band did. The bridge also doesn't take off like the original did - The Showdown prefers a little bit of soulful riffing on the song's lead guitar line, rather than the zippy, distorted solo that filled that space in the original. It's not a bad cover, nor is it an inaccurate representation of the song, but fans of the original will be a little disappointed. Listen for a cute little bit of dialogue after the fadeout (which is a weak way to end the song, by the way) that mimics the original "everybody's staring at me" snippet the bridged the first two songs on dc Talk's version.

Colored People
Going from edgy pop/rock to a smooth R&B, influenced song made sense when dc Talk did it, since it was the same three singers and a catchy electric guitar riff still gave the song some rock edge. It doesn't work as well to transition from The Showdown to this collaboration between newly signed R&B singer Ayeisha Woods and rapper John Reuben. The vibe is too easygoing here, opting for a little bit of a neo-soul approach and forgetting that dc Talk was very much a hybrid act. Ayeisha tends to do that "purposefully flat" thing with what sounds like would normally be a gorgeous voice, which annoys me (think Raze), and John isn't given much to do but the brief rap break in the middle and the classic countoff that Toby Mac once did. They sing the harmony vocal rather than the main melody for the chorus, which isn't bad, just different. I like that they end it on a soulful little vocal tag, rather than fading out like the original. But the song's about understanding and stamping out racism, so I just feel like it should have been performed with a little more oomph.

Jesus Freak
Here's a hip-hop group that gets it right - mostly, anyway. 4th Avenue Jones is one of those groups that I respect even if I haven't really gotten into them - they're two girls and a guy who know how to fuse intelligently written hip-hop with a rock edge, and as such, they were a pretty ideal choice to cover this monolithic title track. Their version's a little more funked out, but still follows the original pretty closely, at least until Ahmad Jones, with his cartoonish rap vocal, decides to get a bit lazy and skip a few words here and there. Tena Jones gets to cover the vocal parts originally sung by Kevin Max and Michael Tait, and she handles them more than adequately, even though it's quite weird to hear a female vocal doing that tripped out, "oh, oh, o-oh!" thing that Kevin Max did to add character to the original. They don't deviate too much from the format, bit it fits their style well and they have fun with it, so I enjoy it.

What If I Stumble?
Here's the first real curveball. Sarah Kelly, a rock chick with a formidable voice that is part Jennifer Knapp, part Ashley Cleveland, and part Janis Joplin, takes this reflective, repentant ballad about misleading people when put on a pedestal, and turns it into a haunting piano ballad that later erupts into an unsettling rocker. She croons along with it in a way that's fairly easy to follow for the first verse (omitting Toby's whispered parts), but during the second verse, the chord sequence gets changed up to match her weird, descending melody. It's rather difficult to get used to, but once you do, you realize that she's made this one her own and it works quite well. The best parts is when she revs up the repeated line "Everyone's got to crawl when you know that you're up against a wall, it's about to fall" from the original bridge, actually making it the vocal camp that abruptly ends the song as it builds to near-screaming levels of vocal power. I miss the conclusion from the original - "I hear You whispering my name, You say 'My love for you will never change'" - but I really like the disturbed mood here.

Day By Day
The power rock trio House of Heroes takes on this radically altered cover of a song from the musical Godspell, making it a cover of a cover, even though a lot of next-gen dc Talk fans likely have no idea of its origins. They don't play it all that differently from the dc Talk original, and the band's two lead vocalists can't quite manage to fill in all the space that dc Talk's three vocalists did, so this too comes up a bit short in the "punchy chorus" department. House of Heroes was the perfect band to pick for the shifting rhythmic structure of the song, which goes from relaxed verses to a sprinting chorus. They power up the intro a bit just to put their edgy little stamp on it, but for the most part, they're just doing the karaoke thing here. (Check out their album Say No More, though - that's some strangely good stuff.)

Mr. Tobin
Instead of remaking the humorous "Mrs. Morgan" interlude about a cantankerous old woman word for word, a man who was once hired as Toby's assistant recounts a story of moving into a house that was once the old Gotee studio, living across the street from the Morgans, and having to explain to them that he wasn't Toby. It isn't really all that interesting.

Between You and Me
Here's the best surprise on the album. The ever-adaptable Relient K has the tricky job of taking an R&B-influenced pop song with a Seal-inspired melody and the tricky chords that come with it, and making it work as a pop-punk tune. Thankfully, RK has gone a long way beyond being a three-chord punk band, and they play this one like one of the halfway mellow tracks from Mmhmm, carefully maintaining the original chords and giving it a little bit of a youthful edge. The words sound genuine coming from Matt Thiessen's lips, since he's written plenty of his own songs about betrayal and apology in relationships. The only thing that bugs me is how, after a bridge which features a delightful classical guitar solo, the song just peters out as they return to the first line of the chorus and then end, rather than finishing the full length of the original song. We're only missing some repetitions of the chorus, really, but it seems to soon to just let it trail off.

Like It, Love It, Need It
Whoever these Fighting Instinct guys are, their lead singer sounds like a dead ringer for Jon Foreman from Switchfoot as he covers Toby's purposefully thin vocal part and begins to describe a nihilistic generation who is "anti-everybody". This is one of those dc Talk songs that has some fairly witty verses, but kind of a stupid chorus that makes Jesus sound like a drug being pushed. It's more memorable for its energy than anything else, and not surprisingly, this band can't fully match the fullness of the original. It isn't for lack of trying, but it seems like none of these bands want to go all the way and incorporate all of the little fun bits that made the dc Talk versions so addictive. I am amused by the way the lead singer actually sings Toby's rap break, though. But I do miss the Red Hot Chili Peppers-esque breakdown that comes immediately before that.

Jesus Freak (Reprise)
Hands-down the most annoying track on the original, this remake is probably another one of those that you'll listen to once for laughs, but skip most of the time. I can't think of anyone better suited for the task of a purposefully cheesy interlude than goofy rapper John Reuben, who intentionally over-sings and tries to pump up the choir behind him as he goes on with his nerdy preaching. It's funny in the same way that William Hung is funny, I guess.

In the Light
Here's another cover of a cover - it's kind of weird that dc Talk is now the name commonly attached to this song, rather than original writer and performer Charlie Peacock. Toby Mac added a bridge to it to kind of make it his own, so I can sort of understand. StorySide:B, which sounds like more of a pop/rock type band to my ears, adds their own flavor to it by giving it more of a metallic intro (meaning that the sound more closely resembles metallic objects, not "heavy metal", if that makes any sense) and toning down the acoustic elements just a tad. They seem to have the multiple vocalists and studio tricks (a little bit of vocorder here and there) to make this one just about as fun as dc Talk's version, though the hints of reggae in the chorus breakdown later on aren't there. There's a bit of a lyrical goof in the bridge when one of the singers mixes up a line, singing "the fume that once did cover me" instead of "the fame that once did cover me". It sounds pretty stupid, but it's one word, so it's forgivable.

What Have We Become?
I don't know jack squat about this Liquid guy who takes on this sad song about selfishness among American Christians, but he certainly knows how to recast the song in an appropriate musical setting. The song was originally a dark, R&B sort of thing; he maintains that while giving it a bit more of a Gospel flavoring, which actually works really well. It's like he's Kirk Franklin as far as the arrangement goes, but he can actually sing instead of just shouting meaningless crap along with the rest of the group. Lots of organic instrumentation appears here, like the piano and trumpet, and there's a choir just to add an extra feeling of "lament" to it. Toby's raps are curiously done by some guy who sounds a lot like Tone Loc with his deep, gravelly voice. My only real beef here is that, during the bridge, after the line "What about holiness?", it's like the singers totally forgot the next few lines, so we never get the powerful thought that followed this one up in the original - "What about mercy compassion, and selflessness?", nor the line which ultimately brought a bit of resolution to it - "You know it's true, He is there for me and you, doesn't matter what you do". They handle the coda beautifully, though, bringing it to a sharp ending which transitions suddenly into the final song from the original album.

Mind's Eye
If you've never heard of Family Force 5, they're a group centered around a few siblings who released some cheesy kid-band albums in the 90's under the name The Brothers. Now they're all grown up and they play something called "crunk rock", which is basically rap/rock with super-trashy sounding vocals and some of the lingo and synthesizer cliches brought in from "Dirty South"-styled hip-hop. It's good for a laugh if you can handle the nails-on-chalkboard vocals of Solomon Olds, but it kind of does an inspiring lyric about the nature of faith injustice to more or less play it as a campy joke. It's also kind of unoriginal to keep the Billy Graham sample from the original untouched rather than doing something to make it fit the song better. This track is there and gone before you can fully realize how irritating it is, and on some days I still enjoy it.

The Gotee Brothers Interlude
This one's a total waste of time. Just a slow rhythm-and-bass groove that might serve as an interlude on a relaxed hip-hop album. It is in no way connected to any musical piece from the original Jesus Freak and given that the final track on the original album featured the hidden Kevin Max poem "Alas My Love", I feel hurt that they didn't make some attempt to refer to it here. One of Gotee's many rap artists could have done a nice spoken word here, either reciting the original poem or adding another chapter to it.

Between You and Me
At the end of the disc, we get two bonus renditions of earlier songs. The first one finds rap/pop hybrid act Paul Wright teaming up with Ayeisha Woods for a mellower take on "Between You and Me", which features a nice little tinkling piano and is truer to the sound of the original, but ultimately isn't that interesting. Again, it's one of those "singing karaoke" types of things.

Jesus Freak
This final track is, by far, the worst instance on this record of a band totally murdering a song. Hardcore group Chasing Victory rips into this beloved classic with all manner of thrashing guitars and shredding screams, and honestly, I could see that style fitting the extreme nature of this song very well. In theory, having the rap verses be screamed hardcore style makes total sense. In practice, because the rhythm of the song is slowed down, it just drags everything out and makes the delivery super-awkward (and it takes over six minutes to get the job done!) The lead vocalist can't even decided whether he wants to be consistent about the speed at which these lines are delivered. Making matters much worse is the distorted guitar solo during the bridge, which sounds a lot like the original, but comes after one of those annoying hardcore rock-style shifts in tempo for no real reason whatsoever, and includes ear-shredding screams of "Stranger!!!", which just sound retarded. And then, for the final insult, we get this chorus of background vocals during the last chorus excitedly shouting, "I'm not gonna hide it!" like some sort of hyped-up youth group or something. 4th Avenue Jones totally kicked these guys' butts up the street and back down in terms of whose rendition of this song is the better one.

So yeah, you can do without the "extra tracks". But the remakes of the original 10 songs that constitute the main body of this tribute album are generally enjoyable, if a bit flawed. Every original version outdoes its remake, but that doesn't mean that this isn't a worthwhile attempt to pay Jesus Freak its respects and make some of the album accessible to another generation (even if that generation would probably enjoy the original version as is). I don't think we'll ever get a tribute to Supernatural (which is a shame; it's my favorite dc Talk record but it kind of lives in Jesus Freak's shadow), but I'd love to see a follow-up someday that covers some of the best tracks from that record as well as Free at Last, and perhaps a few non-album tracks that dc Talk did a good job with such as "My Will". I won't hold my breath, though. Maybe quitting while they're ahead is a better approach.

ALBUM WORTH:
So Help Me God $1
Colored People $1
Jesus Freak $1.50
What If I Stumble? $1.50
Day By Day $1
Mr. Tobin $0
Between You and Me $1.50
Like It, Love It, Need It $1
Jesus Freak (Reprise) $.50
In the Light $1.50
What Have We Become? $1.50
Mind's Eye $1
The Gotee Brothers Interlude -$.50
Between You and Me $.50
Jesus Freak -$.50
TOTAL: $12.50

Websites:
http://www.gotee.com (record label site: includes links to artist websites for pretty much everyone on this album)
http://www.dctalk.com (original artist)

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Driving