Unspoken Get to Me. You may have heard this soulful pop-rock before – several times, by others


Label: Centricity
Time: 5 Tracks / 16 minutes

“I’m running out of things to say,” sings Chad Mattson as this EP begins. It’s an apposite line, given that the whole set is straight out of the CCM factory door, so there is only so much that hs allowed to say anyway. Pretty much everything you hear on this collection is regurgitated from earlier factory releases.

Thankfully, it is less cloned than the worship side of CCM, but several stock elements are recognisable when you hear them. There is a perky radio song as an opener (yes, it does start with those big chords then shrinks back to be a completely different song); the title track is the ballad about how God is desperate for us; “You’ve Got Love for Me” has a bouncy acoustic guitar backing that seems picked note-for-note from a couple of other songs and another ballad “Lost” gets, well, lost.

Most songs are enjoyable while they are on, although there are more memorable projects that could easily fill the space. Musically, most flexible is “Who You Are,” which would be just as much at home with a soul backing as the one it gets here, and several times the vocals are strikingly close to a not-quite-so-soulful version of Jimmy Needham.

For Christian music, there’s a lot about Me and a lot less about Us; while God’s Kingship and restoring his broken creation doesn’t really get a look in. Surprise, surprise.

Technically, the band does its job, but that’s just it – it’s all clean factory music, with little originality. Try naming the artists they sound like and it’s very difficult, because they themselves sounded like yet others who were also anonymous record label fodder: new faces, same sound. I don’t expect to hear from Unspoken any more often than, say, Nathaniel Sutton or Julia Grace.

Which – unless you want to freshen up your safe radio play list with a new name – makes it all somewhat pointless.

3tocks
Derek Walker
http://walkerwords.wordpress.com

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