Win by Knockout: Risk Everything [CD]

Tracklist

EXAMPLE
POWER
BALANCE
BALANCE DUB
DEFINITE
NEVER A STONE
KINGDOM KEYS
KING DUB
BEGINNING
LET ME

Product Description

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Description:
Win By Knockout is a unique Vineyard album with reggae and island influences woven together with intimate worship concepts. This recipe is worship dynamite. Musicologist, worship leader and law student, David Linhart (Greater Boston Vineyard) expands the boundaries of "traditional contemporary worship" using the understatedly deep spirituality of reggae and kingdom lyrics.

About the Artist:
David earned Bachelor and Masters degrees in Bioengineering at Cornell University and is currently a law student at Boston University. He has served as youth pastor for Greater Boston Vineyard, and as a performer has shared the stage with The Wailers, Steel Pulse, Michael Franti and others. His musical influences are diverse, and as a seasoned songwriter and performer, his concerts serve as rallies for social awareness—confronting violence against women, promoting ethical eating, and securing fair wages.

Review:
by Dave Schmelzer, Pastor, Greater Boston Vineyard; Author, Not The Religious Type

Like most of my friends - all music-obsessed in our youth, some to the point of becoming music critics by trade for short or long stretches - I know only the highlights of reggae.

Of course I know Bob Marley. I know Jimmy Cliff. I know Peter Tosh. I know that Clapton and The Police made some money off of it. I have a dim memory of that "Red Red Wine" reggae remake. And I have a general sense of the stakes and contribution of reggae - the political protest that seems so at its heart that's oddly and powerfully married to an island "What, me worry?" sensibility.

But there's an intrinsic spirituality to reggae, it seems to dabblers like me, that I can miss. The kind of spirituality that my friends and I - secular as we all were - had a particular thurst for in pop music, given that we were looking for our religion in Springsteen or Songs In The Key Of Life or, more obviously, U2. Surely the heirs to Bob Marley, of all people, would have a lot to offer on that front.

That urge, of course, is adolescent in a lot of ways. Why I would want, oh, John Legend to be my guru rather than my crooner escapes me now.

But nonetheless, when someone comes along who, almost in passing, invites their listeners into that experience as they give us the sort of groove and comfort and escape that we're looking for, I'm taken back to those early yearnings for what pop music can do.

Which brings us to Win By Knockout, who help me understand a bit of, "Oh, that's what I was looking for from the music that gave us 'Many Rivers to Cross' and 'Three Little Birds'!" All of that latent spiritual power that's so embedded at the heart of reggae, that can produce an effect that even the U2 gang can't quite match, at least in that same way...wow, that brings a lot to the table. I'd almost forgotten.

I'll step back for a moment. Win By Knockout may prove to be Bob Marley or Jimmy Cliff, but maybe we should give them a few years and a few more albums before laying that burden on them. But take a listen and see if I'm onto something in terms of what the kind of infectious, intrinsically spiritual reggae they're tossing our way can offer the listener.

Risk Everything starts off meditatively and ends celebratively and in between we get the pleasures of the deceptively simple and richly musical "Balance" and the lilting take on some of the world's most famous spiritual words, "Kingdom Keys."

My own music critic days may be a few years removed, but however rusty my music criticism skills may be, one thing stands out here: these guys can play, and they throw out a kind of passion and groove that is right at the heart of what my music-obsessed friends were looking for. This music would have been on our car stereos; it would have been swapped around, and we would have had circled the date these folks were coming to town.

We'll see together how lasting Win By Knockout proves to be. But, as a starting point, maybe the "they're the band that gets my friends fired up about music" standard has a lot to recommend it. ~ Dave Schmelzer (Greater Boston Vineyard)