Kutless

By Lou Carlozo, contributing writer, GospelMusicChannel.com

I wanted very much to love It Is Well, the second praise and worship album by Kutless (following 2005’s Strong Tower). But what I heard was hard rock that’s not too hard – a dozen songs clothed in music and lyrics that play it safe. Insert drum machine loop here. Paste stadium-rocking guitar rave up there. Tie up every loose end in four minutes or less.

Now, does It Is Well sound clean, lean and strong? You bet. Vocalist Jon Micah Sumrall especially deserves kudos for a voice that glides between a Mac Powell growl and a tenacious tenor. But does this disc take any creative chances? Not really.

And that’s a shame, because a singer of Sumrall’s talent would have a better platform against more imaginative material and production. Granted, the title track comes straight from the hymnal and isn’t one of the easiest songs to tackle, but it tries to make an all-too-predictable leap from sacristy to mosh pit.

“What Faith Can Do,” the first single from the album, contains enough lyrical banality to out-surplus the loaves and fishes: “Everybody falls sometimes/Gotta find the strength to rise/From the ashes, and make a new beginning...” This opening verse typifies much of the record, where any single line in any given song could go on a bumper sticker just below the metallic Jesus-fish thingy. 

That said, “Give Us Clean Hands” deserves props for its satisfying, ear-grabbing chorus of chanting manly men, suggesting a repentant herd of frat boys.

I’m familiar with the praise & worship genre: I’ve reviewed it for some time and did an in-depth story on its rise for CCM Magazine. So I know that by nature it’s meant to be sunnier, simpler and celebratory. But even light needs the contour of shadow to make it inviting and arresting.

Kutless has rendered a record that, to be sure, brims with light and hope. But that light at times proves unrelenting to the point of uniform glare, and beneath that glare, you won’t hear much going on that’s inventive, original or dramatic. The Bible is full of great stories that rise and fall as daylight and darkness duke it out. It Is Well seems more like a carefully edited compendium of poppy, happy endings – all of them “lite.”