PRISM REVIEWS

The Choir, Free Flying Soul
Seventy Sevens, tom tom Blues


The Choir, Free Flying Soul, Tattoo

This Spring The Choir have embarked on their first major tour in
several years (co- sponsored by ESA/PRISM magazine), and have a brand
new recording--Free Flying Soul--for Benson's new alternative music
label, Tattoo. Since Chase the Kangaroo, this band has been among the
very few "modern rock" acts who could make any claim at all to music
innovation, and this disc only proves the point. Free Flying Soul is
loaded with meticulous, lovely melodies layered against Derri
Daugherty's lush, graciously atmospheric guitar feedback and driving,
fat riffs. For simple sound quality, it's hard to imagine that a
record will be released this year that will be more fun.

More important than the continued musical prowess of The Choir,
however, is Steve Hindalong's willingness to wade into lyrical waters
of unsurpassed vulnerability, simply by addressing the pleasures of a
good cigar ("Yellow-Haired Monkeys"), the mysteries of children
("Butterfly"), sobriety ("Away With the Swine"), the yearning for
pure lovemaking ("Slow Spin") and for forgiveness ("If You're
Listening"). The beauty of Free Flying Soul, however, is not its
breadth, but its ability to take the seeming disparate themes and
move from them toward a unified Christian, and at times, romantic
aesthetic. Hindalong is content only when he tells the truth
redemptively, juxtaposing the reach of grace with the grip of our
fallenness and the stuff of our humanity, but never demanding we
equate the two. Instead, Free Flying Soul revels in the mysteries of
our day-to-day struggles, whether they be in the sacred, the sensual,
or the terrible, and insists that insisting on understanding destroys
faith. When Daugherty sings on "If You're Listening" that "Men less
fortunate have been skinned alive/ I'd rather be forgiven than
enlightened" it is clear what lies at the heart of this vision. The
mysteries of love, grace, suffering and sex get a reverent, earthy,
nearly epicurean spin, and Hindalong sounds like a morph of Lord
Byron, Solomon and Paul. (This is, by the way, a good thing). Free
Flying Soul is finally about liberation, calling us all to the
liberty that difficult truth telling and honest human revelry brings.
A record that can easily survive the mining of repeated careful
listening, it once again firmly suggests the importance, and growing
maturity of The Choir. I simply can't imagine respecting a record, or
a band, more.

Seventy Sevens, tom tom Blues, BAI

There used to be a time when a new record from Mike Roe and the
Seventy Sevens was nearly pure event for me. Lately, however, they
have been doing it so much that some of the excitement has worn off.
Still, I'm embarrassed by my lack of enthusiasm. tom tom Blues (BAI),
the latest from Sacramento's most famous ccm rock iconoclast is a
powerful offering, with all the vim and vinegar that made so many of
us first love this band ten years ago. Full of songs of lost and
longing love, most of which teeter on bitterness of the unrelenting
variety, tom tom Blues finds both Roe's songwriting and guitar
playing in exceptional form. He is writing "heavier" music (in style
and substance), but almost despite himself, seems incapable of
writing a hook that doesn't contain soaring melodic lines. It's a
weakness other alternarockers should study and learn. Even better, he
continues to demonstrate why more guitar players than I can name want
to learn to "play like Mike," while the newly reconstituted Seventy
Sevens (they're a trio now) are clearly finding their chops in songs
as rough and lyrical as they've ever sunk their teeth into. OK, on
second thought, I am excited.
Reviewed by Dwight Ozard, PRISM Magazine.

PRISM/ESA will be co-sponsoring the Encore I stage at Cornerstone Festival this summer. Performers at Encore I will include Ashley Cleveland, The Choir, Over The Rhine, and Poor Old Lou.


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