I started this review of Sara Groves’ “Add to the Beauty” several months ago. Now that I see it will never be finished, and that its proximity to the album’s release makes it superfluous, I’m just posting it out of lack of will to burn it at the altar of good practice. In fact, I didn’t actually get around to the album; perhaps one of the stand-out aspects of album reviewing. I’d love to expand on some of the things I used the review to comment about, so here it is for my perpetual viewing.
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I am dealing with my resentment towards the category “Adult Contemporary.” AC is the purgatory between Top 10 and Oldies; a mod-furnished hospital room with cable TV, but a hospital room nonetheless. So when AC claims the man who wrote “Message in a Bottle,” or the band that brought you “Recovering the Satellites,” or relegates the uncategorizable Joni Mitchell to a disposable pop ghetto, you have a twinge of gratitude that Jeff Buckley was offered the tragic grace of an early departure.
The only thing harder to ‘fess up to than appreciation for an AC artist is high regard for a resident of the Contemporary Christian bin. Music that is safe for the whole family might keep your children clean on the way to school, but hope that rises from “everything is so great” is losing altitude fast. It has a beat, and you can dance to it, but you probably won’t for long.
So when the folks-in-charge present you with Sara Groves, Adult Contemporary artist, Midwestern wife and mother who watches Dr. Phil, file under “CCM,” it’s not exactly a sale that stirs the soul. But soul is exactly why “Add to the Beauty” creeps out of the bin at night and holds a singer-songwriter tent revival where Indie, Americana, Pop and R&B shed joyful tears at the altar. Groves, like CCM-ambivalence victims Waterdeep or alt refugees Over the Rhine, gets that music makes immanent, like no other art form, the satisfying ache of life between the holy and the human condition.
There’s a reason why you’re more likely to whisper “Lord, have mercy” in the grip of Otis Redding than on the front row at a Point of Grace show (props to you, ladies, but it’s just true). Gospel music is not simply music full of scripture; it is a sacramental, sustained, Spirit-groan that rises from paint-chipped, cracked wood, sweaty pews, from glistening, lined faces and raised, calloused hands clinging with unquenched confidence to the promises of God. It celebrates not a hollow victory of “we were already ok, and now we feel great!” but is a party in defiance of the passing realities set against us. When the exuberance and longsuffering of Gospel music left the pew for the big time, it birthed jazz, the blues, and rock and roll. It kept the flame under Memphis Soul Stew. Groves, who lists Gospel artists among her greatest influences, has a direct line to this tradition that bypasses all of CCM’s manufactured pop-evangelism and AC’s rock-lite. She reveals the hollowness of both genres, whose strained reach is not for Mercy’s extended hand but for the fickle handshake of the market share.
When Groves, whose collaborations with Neil Sabin, Charlie Peacock, and now CCM godfather Brown Bannister seem to bring out the best in these producers and arrangers, lets you smolder through an extended burn near the end of “You Are the Sun,” you begin to get that Gospel music is more than hooky prooftexting. “Add to the Beauty,” as an album and a title track, captures the now and not-yet of the Kingdom, our longing for God’s final renewing of our fractured worlds, and the liminal moments where the Kingdom shows through the heroism of everyday kindness in the name of Christ.
(Just imagine what obsequious praise I might have heaped on from this point).
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