Canter Bridge

Nobody does high-energy, emotionally exuberant musical praise like Australia’s Hillsong. This reviewer is happy to leave the debate about whether Hillsong is a church or a production company to those closer to the ground. Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy the music.

Several currents of biblical phrase course through this album. Most prominent is the conviction that praise of the biblical God is the responsibility, privilege, and destiny of all the nations, the whole earth, and similarly comprehensive roundings-up of the created world.

When this comprehensiveness—those who do not share Christian faith my wonder whether the appropriate term is totalitarianism—is turned on its axis, a second biblical concern arises: the temporal. The band sings: ‘All of my days I will speak of your rightness // All of my days I will tell of your wondrous work in my life’.

Biblical praise tends to fill up the time and space given to it and then to remain alert for still other spaces that may open up. This expansiveness is refracted in the biblical witness not as celebration of humankind’s capacity to do the deed of worship but rather as a reflection of the Lord’s large dignity and worth. In my estimation, You Are My World gets this reflex just about right.

The music is thoroughly aligned with the ‘praise-and-worship’ genre, though at a high technical standard. What stands out in this CD is not so much the music per se as the acutely thoughtful mix of lyrics. These manage to escape the narcissistic temptation that is common to the craft. The mix of doxology—praise directed to God—with the experiential exuberance of worship rightly accentuates the former over the latter without neglecting the emotional updraft that worship rightly provides to the Lord’s daughters and sons when they get down to it.

The large presence of Hillsong’s inimitable Darlene Zschech is everywhere to be felt on this album, not least on the open-piped ‘Everything That Has Breath’. ‘No energy shortage here.

These things are supremely subjective, but one intuits of Zshech and company that the heart is very much in the right place and the mind showing every evidence of catching up with the more visceral instincts of this fine music.

One finds ‘Thank You for the Cross’ particularly gratifying in this kind of liturgical music, vulnerable as it is to effectively denying that scandalizing divine work by dint of negligence and concentration on more flamboyant things. This song anchors an album of this kind right in the sweet spot (though sorrow is as evident a sentiment in the face of such things) where it belongs.

You Are My World may be the finest of its kind that this reviewer has heard.

Energy, biblical instincts that are more than just show, a driving musicianship, and a way with the soul. I’m afraid I’ve got to give the fifth star with this one.