Canter Bridge

Male voices, when they work well together, are a marvel.

This is as true of England’s soccer stadiums as it is of a tightly knit gospel quartet. It’s hard to say whether the four men of Overtones have ever been near a soccer stadium, but the odds are long.

No matter. What they do, they do very, very well.

The gospel genre breeds rabid fans and cultured disdain in about equal measure. Unless you’re born into this cultural phenomenon, it does prove more often than not to be an aquired taste. From a content perspective, its spirituality majors in the individual encounter with Jesus, throwing up a lot of smarmy sentimentality for every solid piece of articulated faith.

Yet something very special happens when a bass anchors, a baritone and second tenor build, and a first tenor does the ornamentationl It happens on this CD, not in every song but in a few. When it comes together, it’s a beautiful thing indeed.

‘Shelter Me’ and the quartet’s tonally nuanced version of ‘Amazing Grace’ are the standouts and worth the price of the CD (I received mine as a gift).

Something happens when men sing. When this writer’s faith was sinking in an honest, post-adolescent funk during my sophomore year in college, it was the beauty I encountered in the music of the Wheaton College Men’s Glee Club—I was a marginal second tenor—that kept me in touch with Beauty (capital ‘B’) that was not empirically measurable by the normal means—until my soul migrated back to a mature faith in God’s good moment.

Something happens.