Broken by Brendan Brooks
Thick with crunchy guitars, tinkling melodies, and explosion of sound that fills the ears with a giant wall of sound, Brendan Brooks drives in eleven original songs of praise and worship with his latest album, Broken. You can definitely hear influences from artists like Steven Curtis Chapman, Caedmon’s Call, and Jeremy Camp in Brendan’s Broken.
Brendan Brooks fills Broken with scripture inspired songs that dwell upon feeling and seeing God. His voice effectively cuts through the mix and delivers the songs with sincerity and enough emotion to convince the listener to possibly sing along. The collection of songs are well written, with good melodies and enough description that they don’t fall into what commonly plagues a lot of Christian music, and that is the use of the same lyrical cliches. While it is beautiful to use scripture, many Christian songwriters do not utilize the breadth of language to describe or relate scripture to today. Brendan takes us on a journey through jungles, visions of seas, and expanse with “Worthy to Be Praised.” When Brendan does rely on the often used phrases, as in “Broken” and “Lift ‘Em Up,” he employs catchy riffs and fun melodies.
Broken is well mixed and produced, my only complaint is that each of the tracks is pushed to 0.0db. While this may not mean a lot to most listeners, what it effectively means for the listener, is there’s no room to turn up the album in the car. You’ll end up turning it down to fit your sound system. To the sensitive ear, you can hear just the edge of distortion, which is wonderfully covered up by the distortion in the guitar, but in several spots you can hear the distortion start to effect Brendan’s voice. Most won’t pick up on it, but for those who are audiophiles, it might bother you, because when you turn it down, you still hear the edge of distortion in places.
Overall, Broken is a good solid offering of upbeat and mid tempo songs that will encourage the listener.
Brendan Brooks is from Wonewoc, Wisconsin.
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