Reviewed by Matthew Cordle

Kingsway's 'The Best...Ever!' series is a popular, cost-effective 3CD box set series aiming to "fill your daily walk with songs of substance as you praise and worship the living God." This release tries to single out songs that might be considered as anthems and, as with all this series, you might ask "the best worship anthems according to whom?" as one person's definition of anthem can be quite different to another's, and how does anyone judge that these 50 are better than all others. . .ever!? Maybe we'll put that down to marketing people being creative, but this series has flown off the shelves of Christian retailers so something has worked! As with others in the series Kingsway have once again compiled a selection of top notch studio and live recordings from artists such as Brenton Brown, Leigh Nash, The City Harmonic, Aaron Keyes, Kathryn Scott, Stuart Townend and many others. Some are singing their own songs, some singing their arrangements of other writers' songs. Most of the "anthems" here are songs that contain a level of passionate intensity, mostly a slow/mid tempo intensity as in The Desperation Band's "Strong God", for example. They easily draw the listener's focus to Jesus in praise, in confession, and in pleading with him to change us, and in many cases you cannot help but start singing along. The recordings are excellent and whilst a couple of vocal performances don't sit so well with the song, the majority of arrangements work very well. Hard to pick highlights but key "anthems" for me are "King of Wonders", "Everlasting God", "How Deep The Father's Love" and "One Thing Remains" with its great declaration "Your love never fails. . .it never runs out on me". Nice one again Kingsway!

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