"Take me higher, higher, higher with you..." cries the chorus of the opening track of this disc. This is what the album aims to do; take the listener along in a higher way; a way of deep thought and interesting guitar-based rock.
By and large, it succeeds. The tunes are decently crafted, reminding the listener at times of Third Eye Blind, or the Gin Blossoms, and the lyrics are reasonable, sufficiently indirect to avoid triteness but with the Christian underpinnings that a person would expect.
And this is its downfall; there's little surprising, exciting, or groundbreaking to this album. In fact, the mixing of a few songs put the vocals far enough in front of the music that they end up sounding detached, as though this is a solo singer in front of a generic backing band of which he has little pride. This clearly isn't the case, but the mix makes it sound that way. Fortunately, most songs on the album have a little more even balance to the mix. It's true that the vocals on an album need to be heard, but I'm sure that there is no need to push them so far out front, as on the first track, that there's nothing else that is emphasized.
It's a fair album, but one that needs a little bit more to break out of the pack of guitar rock albums.
3 tocks
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