There's a kind of band I call a "basement band"--the kind that usually spend more time practising in someone's basement than on stage (any stage, no matter how small.) Most of this kind of band comes and goes without ever getting near a recording studio. The only place you will catch one outside a basement or garage is likely to be the local fairgrounds, or perhaps the basement or gym of a church which is desperate to reach out to "young people" and doesn't know enough about the music to distinguish the class acts from the wannabes. Bands like this have tons of enthusiasm, and there is no ignoring them when they play. The lyrics are straight-ahead, even if they are frequently yelled more than sung, and the music is similarly straight-ahead rock and roll. Loud and driving, with a guitar or two, a bass, a drum set keeping the beat, and maybe, if you want to get really fancy, a keyboard. If the lead guitarist muffs a chord change or two, a little extra distortion on the amp covers a lot of sins, right?
By now, you should have a fairly good picture in your head of the kind of music I'm talking about. You've probably heard bands like this. You may even have played in bands like this. Now, picture a band who's been in the game long enough that they can sing the lyrics, rather than just yelling them, without losing the intensity. Imagine a band where the distortion on the amp is there because rock and roll was meant to be played at top volume, not to cover up for fumbling fingers. Imagine a band that has been around the block long enough to know their craft inside out, but still sticks to the roots of the music, instead of letting it get homogenised into the kind of stuff that will get airplay on AM Christian radio. That is what David and the Giants sound like.
These guys have been around awhile, and they're not getting stale. In fact, if anything, they sound more like the classic rock and roll band than they did in 1984 when they released Inhabitants of the Rock (and, just like back then, the lyrics are uncompromisingly Christian.) This is not to say that every cut on the album is guaranteed to irritate your mother. There are also a couple of great ballads, "No One but You," and "Inside my Heart," and one sort of pop number called "I Was Made For You," but the volume doesn't stay down for very long. Perhaps "The Beat Goes On" could be taken as a theme song for the album, and the band's career: "I gotta tell you I'm not going through a phase/I got the Holy Ghost and the fire is a blaze... The beat goes on and on and on/And the rhythm getting faster with time."
