I have a confession to make.
Sometimes, when a new artist comes out and has a hit song, it takes me a while to sort out who’s who.
Was that unshaven-looking guy with the big hit Jeremy Riddle or Jimmy Needham or Brandon Heath or Matthew West?
(I said “it takes me a while” to figure out who the sometimes-same-sounding singers are, not “I never sort them out”)
That being said, you don’t have any trouble figuring out who Capital Lights is.
The first thing I thought when I heard a few tunes from last year’s “This Is an Outrage,” on Tooth & Nail Records, is … whoa, these guys have a big sound.
Alas, it’s a sound that we are not likely to hear again.
The band in recent months announced it is disbanding, with members feeling that The Lord has a different plan for each of their lives.
As the guys sort through figuring out what that plan will be, I hope they can rest on some residuals from sales of “Outrage,” a truly unique work at a time when music, if makers of it aren’t careful, can sound a lot like a lot of other music.
“Outrage” has lots of ‘80s orchestration and the like happening, and then I heard “Return,” the current hit from the CD, and that sound got even bigger.
What a catchy song! And what amazing orchestration
One reviewer in Christian Music Today wrote, “Sounds like … a combination of Green Day, Anberlin, Relient K, and Jimmy Eat World, fusing together power pop, emo, and punk rock.”
The band’s frontman Bryson Phillips also has an extremely easy-to-spot (OK, “hear”) vocal style with almost defiantly clear punctuation (and that is a wild departure from the mumbling mass of mainstream rock).
Other top songs on “Outrage” are “Worth as Much as a Counterfeit Dollar,” “Out of Control,” “Remember the Day,” the earlier radio hit “Mile Away” and “Frank Morris,” maybe the only song you or I will ever hear about the mastermind of the (unsuccessful, it’s believed) Alcatraz prison escape.
More than a decade after the fact, Capital Lights’ sudden rise and sudden departure from the Christian music scene reminds me of the story of Black Eyed Sceva, a harder-edged band from Santa Barbara, Calif. in the mid- and late-1990s.
Led by a truly great song called “Ecumenical” and a strong, snarling sound, BES had one of the great Christian records of 1996, called “5 Years, 50,000 Miles Davis.”
The band seemed to start its slide when they changed the name to Model Engine, since lots of people couldn’t pronounce the “Sceva” in their first name (it was pronounced like “See-Va”).
Like Black Eyed Sceva, thank you, Capital Lights, for a huge contribution in a short time to Christian music.