Broadjam Artist: Randal Dunkle
Song: The Salvation Song (Roberts/Dunkle)
Reviewer: Calico King
Positive Comments: For the sake of being objective, I try to listen and give as much feedback to the song with out any biased I might have towards a particular genre or set of lyrics that said, for a second I thought I was listening to some C.S.N.Y. or Buffalo Springfield, Byrds, due to the beautiful harmonies, the vintage clean guitar tone, the refined drums, and the overall sound of the tone. It has very positive energy and sincerity in the vocals, and the overall production value was pretty good.
Constructive Comments: I have a hard time with Christian Rock, and the Christian Genre, but it’s not my place to judge another person’s musical taste and I am no authority on what defines quality lyricism. As I stated above, I loved the music and the melody/harmonies and atmosphere. I can’t deduct points for subject matter, because I know it’s a major market. My only issue with this song, is one that I have with a lot of songs in this genre as it exists right now I think there’s an over simplification and lack of diversity in the genre at large, and so much christian music just seems to tell me one thing praise jesus. I understand these are worship tunes, but I also was raised in the christian tradition and minored in religious studies in college, and I feel like there is so much more to be extracted from the canonical gospels than mere celebrations of faith. I understand that to be a christian artist you have to have worship songs, but what I don’t understand is why everything has to be a worship song. Look at the gospels and all the literary devices that make jesus’s life so intriguing elements of narrative, parable, metaphor, symbolism– there’s conflict, temptation, mystery, courage, redemption, betrayal, dialogue etc. Why doesn’t any christian music step out of the comfort zone and every try to make songs that aren’t as simple as “Praise Jesus” — I think if you were to start looking deeper in to the individual situations of the gospel and use that as source material, you could add more color to the genre for example a song about Peter’s denial 3 times and what it means to abandon conviction. A song about Judas’s guilt and the gut wrenching pain between Jesus and Judas for that betrayal would be interesting. How about a song that explores what it means to see your faith abused by money changers, and Jesus’s reaction when he saw that in the temple. I only say this because you’re music is beautiful, and I understand that you have your deeply held beliefs, and I seriously encourage you to take the new testament, find something small, and construct a song around it. It could add color or dimension to this music. It could even reach a bigger audience. I would love to hear a song like yours still give praise, but explore faith in less black and white terms , less cliches, less redundant hooks and verses.