Another artist I’ve been listening to for awhile and just hadn’t gotten around to writing a review about them has been Blake Bollinger.
Blake’s album “No Holiday” is his solo album debut, but he’s gotten plenty of experience under his belt with his former band Destination Known as well as leading worship at the 2nd Baptist Church in Houston on their Pearland Campus.
This thirteen track debut album presents a bit more contemporary and energetic sound than what he started off doing. He says his work has matured and grown from simple acoustic guitar and piano ballads as he’s felt the impact of performing for live audiences and getting the type of feedback a live audience can provide.
I think my music has gone up a few notches in the “rock n roll” category since I first started. Probably true with many musicians, my earliest songs were basically piano or acoustic ballads, but as I experienced how fun it is to engage a crowd with a high-energy song, I definitely started heading in that direction artistically.
The album is very well produced and has a great clean sound. One of my pet peeves with some groups is that the lyrics and vocals are overshadowed by the rest of the instrumentation. With “No Holiday”, everything is mixed and blended well so that one thing compliments the other and doesn’t fight internally.
If there were one thing I had to pick out about the album is that there could be more differentiation between songs. Sometime the overall tonal quality and rhythm of a song sounds too much like a previous song or the next one. Not a huge deal, when you’ve got a good sound you should stay with it, but I’d like to hear some of his other stuff to see the migration of his talent and experience as a musician.
One thing that clearly speaks to me about this album is that I can relate to the lyrics and meanings behind each song. I get the feeling that if I could memorize and read the lyrics to some of the songs, they would feel just like a prayer being sent up to the heavens for me.
Here’s the full track listing for the album:
- Falling Faster
- Time
- No Holiday
- Glitter
- Tell the World
- Free
- Weight
- Say the Lines
- To Say I Was Wrong
- Close Enough
- Here I Am
- Take It All
- Hidden Track – a really ethereal remix of “Take It All”
To learn more about Blake Bollinger and hear some samples of his music from this album visit his MySpace page at www.myspace.com/blakebollinger.
