Various Artists
Paradigm Ambient Hits Collection - The Greatest Praise & Worship Choruses
Reviewed by Bert Gangl
Webster's dictionary defines ambience as "a distinctive atmosphere surrounding or spreading through a person or a place." As the title of the release implies, The Ambient Hits Collection - The Greatest Praise And Worship Choruses is a reworking of well-known choruses into ambient pieces. Ambient music, in contrast to other styles which use the instrumental tracks as a backdrop for the vocal track, makes liberal use of techniques like echo and delay to blend both the instrumental and vocal tracks together into a uniform musical landscape where neither is prominent.
The music on this collection sounds much like that of the Disco Saints or the Nitro Praise releases. In fact, "I Will Call Upon The Lord" and "I Exalt Thee" sound nearly identical to their Saint-ly counterparts. Of course, this might be due to the fact that The Ambient Hits Collection was produced by David Lyndon Huff, who also produced Dance House Praise by the Disco Saints. That's not to say, however, that the music on this album is not unique. While both the Disco Saints and Nitro Praise releases basically keep the melodies of the choruses intact and place them to synthesized drum and keyboard parts, the songs on this project tend to alter the melody lines slightly, making them more dissonant and less similar to the original choruses. And the vocals on The Ambient Collection are placed only briefly here and there in each of the songs rather than being sung constantly throughout.
The fact that many of the songs seem to sound alike might strike some listeners as overly repetitive, while others would consider that uniformity necessary to set the tone of the album. In reality, good praise music is probably like a good television. When you first buy the TV, you tend to notice things like the sharpness of the picture or the quality of the audio. But, after a while, you forget about all that and just watch what's on the set. Similarly, praise material shouldn't seek so much to bring attention to the music itself, but rather serve as a backdrop for the listener to enter into worship. And this release does that quite nicely.
