ALBUM REVIEW

Ian Yates :
Desperate to See Your Glory

If the Six Degrees theorem is to be believed, every person who has ever made an appearance on the big screen or television can be linked, with varying degrees of closeness, to actor Kevin Bacon. Of course, long before Bacon ever donned his first cranberry tux and set out to save the senior prom, folks in the UK have been putting forth similar claims with regard to England ’s most famous musical sons. While the universality of any such Beatles connection is nearly impossible to prove, singer Ian Yates can claim at least a tangential association to the Fab Four. For starters, he currently heads up the praise team at Bootle Christian Fellowship in Liverpool , the birthplace of John, Paul, George and Ringo. Perhaps even more convincingly, though, Yates leads worship twice a month at the Liverpool Boiler Room, a community center which was formerly The Strawberry Fields Children’s Home, the venue immortalized in the Beatles’ 1967 hit, “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

His ties to the Fabs notwithstanding, Yates’ sophomore record is molded from a decidedly more contemporary lump of musical clay. The stimulating opening cut, “Take My Life” draw from the anthemic, semi-ethereal Britpop of Coldplay and the quiet-verse/loud-chorus scheme employed by seemingly the lion’s share of rock-oriented acts in the post-Nirvana era. “Bright and Beautiful,” on the other hand, points to the electronica/synthpop hybrid favored by artists like Joy Electric and the Echoing Green. And “Come What May” marries passionate, half-shouted vocals and frenetic, chiming guitar work to the underlying chord progression of “With or Without You” for a sound that harks back to classic, ‘80s-era U2.

While the rock-inclined entries are certainly pleasant enough, it is on the slower material that Yates truly hits his stride. The subdued musical tone and stark, yet hopeful lyrics of “When All Is Stripped Away” (When all is striped away/ When brokenness surrounds/ When all is confusing/ When weakness abounds/ I find my hope in you) parallel those of Matt Redman’s modern praise standard, “The Heart of Worship.” The likewise stirring pop/worship piece “Reverence and Fear” (I’m amazed at your majesty/ Your awesome power/ And your sovereignty) makes expert use of orchestral flourishes and dynamics, moving from hushed reverence to all-out jubilation and back again with seeming effortlessness. And the beautiful, almost haunting, piano-based “Create in Me a Clean Heart” (Take My Heart and soften it/ Take my heart and mold it/ Take my heart and purify it, O Lord) captures simple, sincere worship in its purest, most unadulterated form.

Sturdy as it is, the Glory project is not entirely without blemish. Certain songs end a bit abruptly, while others, such as “ Sea of Love ,” sound as if they’re being faded in at their midpoint. Yates’ vocals veer wide of their intended mark in more than one place during the opening section of the otherwise bracing “You.” And a small handful of the cuts, such as “Bright and Beautiful,” sound more like rough demos than fully-finished album tracks. Of course, any such shortcomings fall well shy of showstopping and could be remedied with minimal time and effort. And while, perhaps more notably, the harder-edged material can tend to sound a bit too much like U2, Coldplay, et al., it arguably lends the album an endearing sense of familiarity for followers of the aforementioned groups. A fine complement to Yates’ debut release, Desperate to See Your Glory is a solid, thoroughly engaging project that does a first-rate job of conveying the underlying enthusiasm and passion of its talented creator.

~ Bert Gangl for SockSpider.com