Australia's Top 25 Praise Songs

Performers include: Darlene Zcchech, Rueben Morgan, Rick Founds.
Personnel: Dr. David Evans , Karen Becker, Tony Williams , Randall Waller, Kathy Johnston (vocals); David Holmes, Rex Goh (guitar); Andrew Oh (saxophone); Steve Wyats, Bill Risby (keyboards).
Audio Mixer: Guy Gray.
Recording information: The Entrance Australia; The Well.
Photographer: Kenneth Duncan.
Arranger: David Holmes.
Australia's Top 25 Praise Songs is a collection of Christian worship songs that have been popular in Australia. Many of these should be familiar to American audiences, as songs like "Shine Jesus Shine" have been popular praise hymns for some time in America. Not to mention that many churches pick and choose their music quite carefully, meaning that any of these could be familiar to the right church goer. The performances here are actually quite good, and the team of studio musicians who play these songs have a good grasp on what they should put behind these tracks. The only real problem with the album is how similar these songs are to one another. These tracks mostly have two ways of being presented: big blustery praise anthems and delicate odes to Jesus. Either way, the tracks use much of the same language and musical ideas, blurring certain songs together. The added disadvantage of having the same musical instruments carry all 25 songs makes this hard to really distinguish one track from another at times. But luckily the album does have enough standout tracks to break the mood up, and they do try and switch between the two styles of presentation as much as they can. Overall, this is a good collection of Christian music that only suffers from the occasional lapses in variety. ~ Bradley Torreano