Collisions

My daughters bought me a couple of CDs for Christmas last year (2005) by David Crowder. My CD player in the car was working fine. The Lime was immediately my favorite. The Collision just did not make sense. However when I put Collision on the iPod, it became a whole new experience. The experience of Collision is too subtle for an aging stereo in a car with tad bit of a muffler problem. The songs are not simply a collection of songs of a single genre. The album has a flow to it that is intriguing. There is a mixture of techno-sounds, rock guitar, ethereal high pitched women singing (who may be synthesized, the voices not the women), Amer-Indian chanting, and blue grass banjo. Who would have figured? Collision is worth the time and few bucks to buy.

There are themes of Collision are death and the afterlife, great themes from certain genre of Christian music my friend Lynn Thomas used to call “suicide Christian music”. David Crowder Band explain on their website that the David Crowder's grandfather told him that he should do a blue grass album. (I think it was the grandfather, the story is no longer on the web.) The album reinterprets the banjo picking and mandolin strumming for a new generation. Then also uses techno-synthesized sounds that are reminiscent of a banjo. Not only does the album tip its hat to blue grass via traditional instruments and contemporary recreations of the agile bouncing of the blue grass sound but it also acknowledges the themes used by Christians of the America of days gone by. Christianity on the American frontier experienced death in a very close and organic way. They had a high infant mortality rate. Women would die in child birth. A work related injury was much more likely to be fatal than it is today. They understood death on a whole different level. So singing about heaven was 100% natural. These themes correlate somewhat with the angst of many of todays youth and of those who sense their mortality. These contemporary expressions of the realities of death and our mortality are edgy and depressing. Usually one must dress Goth and then it is just a black tee-shirt with an angst filled, pejorative phrase on it. Perhaps some stark make up and piercings if you are really having a bad day. Crowder Band will resonate with those who truly have a sense of the shortness of this life. But they also address the hope we have in our future, glorified estate. The themes fit the hope filled heart of what my friend used to “suicide Christian music” and yet it is good tunes too.

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