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Ok, I'll admit that I listened to Ryan Delmore's The Spirit, The Water and The Blood for the first time as a soundtrack to some of my own work I was doing (I know, my own work, in my own time, I don't know where I get off), so it was in the background while my attention wandered elsewhere. You may think that this puts it in an unfair position against other albums I have reviewed but I can't see Britt Nicole's The Lost Get Found or Phil Wickham's Heaven and Earth, two of this year's sterling albums, would...
Read More Ok, I'll admit that I listened to Ryan Delmore's The Spirit, The Water and The Blood for the first time as a soundtrack to some of my own work I was doing (I know, my own work, in my own time, I don't know where I get off), so it was in the background while my attention wandered elsewhere. You may think that this puts it in an unfair position against other albums I have reviewed but I can't see Britt Nicole's The Lost Get Found or Phil Wickham's Heaven and Earth, two of this year's sterling albums, would have let me not pay attention to them.
The album opens with a very acoustic feel and it is carried through for the majority of the album. When I say acoustic, I don't mean the traditional, stripped down, simple production definition of acoustic, I mean it has a certain live MTV-unplugged feel to it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in most cases; after all I'm sure you're aware of the MTV Unplugged series as it was a huge success, but live is actually very hard to get right. This album doesn't quite pull it off.
The first track is very live in feel but the one thing you will probably pick up on, and then not be able not to notice for the rest of the album, is the raw feel to the vocals. Even further on in the album where the music has a more produced feel to it, the vocals still sound live and it just doesn't seem to work the way it could.
It's not all bad though; the lyrics are prayerful and stirring in places giving depth to some of the songs but on the whole, the lack of production will always make this album fade into the background for me.
Review by Suzanne Physick
LTTM Rating 2 out of 5 Stars
Stand Out Tracks
Mercy
Teach Me All Your Ways
