GOSPEL-SOAKED BLUES
Turn Around, the latest album from one-time blues wunderkind Jonny Lang, is a funk/soul/gospel/blues testimony to Lang’s musical and spiritual evolution. Lang and his co-writers have crafted 13 songs of personal testimony and exhortation that are firmly rooted in gospel and blues tradition. The lyrics are straightforward accounts of life and faith steeped in a vocabulary of real life and unvarnished experience.
As a teen blues guitar prodigy, Lang was no doubt capable of and encouraged to cut loose as often and as much as possible. And, while his prodigious skills attracted great attention, the scope of Lang’s playing on Turn Around bears witness to the power of restraint. That’s not to say Lang doesn’t let it rip, as songs like the title track, “Don’t Stop (For Anything)” and “It’s Not Over,” among others, prove with definitive results. Elsewhere, Lang provides soulful and intimate framing for the songs that allow the arrangements to move and breathe amid the sum of their influences.
Beyond Lang’s broadening as a guitarist, and, perhaps, more crucial to this record, is his emergence as a convincing and multi-faceted singer. He covers an enormous amount of territory on this record; his voice bends, stretches, whispers, growls and soars with a conviction that leaps out of the speakers. Stripped down ballads “Only a Man,” “Last Goodbye” and “That Great Day” lay bare the hushed emotion of Lang’s voice with a vulnerability that would have been hard to imagine a decade ago hearing the bombastic hit “Lie to Me.”
The album’s only true misstep is the generic “On My Feet Again,” which lacks the soul and passion of its peer tracks. And “My Love Remains,” penned by Lang with Steven Curtis Chapman, is pleasant but sonically and compositionally out of place on this body of work.
At the end of the day, Lang has delivered on his promise with shining results. Turn Around is the kind of gospel-soaked record that will find its way to audiences reticent to sample conventional Christian music as well as inspire others to communicate with this depth of skill.
DAVE PALMER
Review Provided by CCMmagazine.com
