Reviewed by Mike Rimmer

It's not a new idea to fit the words of Scripture to music as a sort of aide memoir. There are plenty of Scripture memory songs out there and they tend to be musically a bit lame. But here's something with plenty of muscle. The project is the brainchild of Americans, Mario Canido and Jared "Trigger" Whitaker, who decided that it would be a good idea to take the spoken words of Jesus from the book of Matthew and put them all into song. I was alerted to the project when I met the pair in Nashville. Using the New Living Translation for the lyrics, this has turned into a three disc project of 40 songs that takes the listener through the entire Gospel. What is remarkable here is that the musical setting for these words of Jesus is a powerful melodic rock. Obviously one of the challenges here is shoehorning the words of Christ into a song format and this works more successfully in some places than others. The huge swathe of songs is also quite a daunting listening experience and to that end, there is a shorter single CD version also available. Standout tracks for me were the catchy "Light Of The World" which was the first song to alert me that this might be something very special. Elsewhere "70x7" is an explosive, heavy, powerful rock track in every sense and "Trees And Fruit" has a late '60s musical vibe. Towards the end of the collection, another outstanding song is "Rapture" is filled with Jesus' ominous warnings about the end times. Overall with a project this size, you'll listen and have your own favourites. The set is nicely boxed and comes complete with the entire book of Matthew in a booklet. It's an immense creative undertaking which is well executed and one of the more unusual releases for the year.

The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those held by Cross Rhythms. Any expressed views were accurate at the time of publishing but may or may not reflect the views of the individuals concerned at a later date.

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