Reviewed by Trevor Kirk

Chris O’Hara’s day job is as a music teacher and performing arts co-ordinator at a Derbyshire community college, and he’s also worked for Songs Of Praise on BBC TV and The Daily Service on BBC Radio 4. But his particular niche in Christian music circles is leading conferences and workshops. This CD has an accompanying songbook, with keyboard/melody and guitar/melody arrangements, so really it’s a resource to enable music groups and chorales to learn new music with which to lead worship. Which is a good thing, because if this had to stand or fall on the quality of the performance, 13 songs and 51 minutes of rather dull unison singing means it would fall rather heavily. Another serious shortcoming for me (this time, wearing my church music group leader’s hat) is that the songbook doesn’t have four-part harmony, because most of these songs are rather hymn-like and might otherwise have appealed to church choir masters. Also, the songs that are intended to be contemporary worship songs rather than hymns are not a patch on the worship material that can be found in any number of songbooks produced by Spring Harvest, The Source or even Mission Praise, so there’s nothing here that I would use instead of anything by Stuart Townend, Graham Kendrick, Dave Bilbrough or Robin Mark. Disappointing.

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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