MUSIC REVIEW: NCC Worship || You Alone

Music

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National Community Church releases NCC Worship’s first label-distributed recording, You Alone.

Produced by Kurtis Parks and Kyle Lee (All Sons & Daughters, Pocket Full of Rocks), You Alone features lead vocalists/musicians Parks, Joel Buckner, Carolina Soto, Dan Rivera and Chris Douglas. Parks, who also serves as NCC’s Worship Director, came to NCC via Nashville where he spent four years touring with his rock band, The Season, which led worship at camps, conferences and churches around the country. Buckner, who serves as NCC’s Worship Leader, has been leading worship nearly all his life on many platforms across the country and around the world.

Different from regular product configurations, You Alone is bundled as a five-song project with full studio recordings, stripped down, live versions of each song and videos of those live versions recorded at Ebenezers coffeehouse. Meant to be a resource for other churches’ worship teams, this Worship Resource Pack also includes lyrics and mini teaching messages from NCC lead pastor, Mark Batterson.

For the opening 5 tracks, the songs are given the full band treatment. The album opens with Majestic which starts with a synth led keyboard sound which is then powered over with all instruments blasting into a full power praise song. The same could be said for ’Christ The Lord Is Risen Today’(He Is Not Dead)’. Both tracks use synths, drums and guitars as you would expect from a worship band who are shouting about the amazing God we have.

For me, ’You Alone’ and ’Eternal One (Psalm 145)’ are the two standout tracks. They push the boundaries musically, keeping the listener on their toes. Both are strong songs with a strong messages pouring out of them.

Yet the whole album is given a different spin when you hear ’Where Would I Be’, this intimate, tender track is simply beautiful. The lyrics of ”Where would I be without your Grace, Where would I be without your love” just touch part of your soul and heart, and take you back to thinking ‘without God we have nothing’.

So as a five track album, this is a solid offering from NCC, with each listen I enjoyed the songs more. We then move to the 5 stripped down versions and for me I think I preferred the songs like this. I can’t put my finger on why. Maybe it’s the fact as a listener you are not distracted by the production of the songs, maybe the songs feel like they are part of a worship time as you can hear a group of people singing together, or maybe they work better like this.

Majestic’s lyrics come over more in the live stripped back version, and the song has some great lines. ’Christ The Lord Is Risen (He Is Not Dead)’ has a fist pumping, ‘yeah’ feel to it. It even has a modern hymn feel. ’You Alone’ is more intimate and honest and ’Eternal One (Psalm 145)’ feels fresher and cleaner as a song in this format. The standout song Where Would I be still sounds great like this, yet I think the studio version has a more haunting element to it which I enjoyed. It’s still a song that will leave you with your head bowed in praise.

As a concept this album is very interesting. Hearing two different versions of each song gives the songs time to grow into the songs they wants to be. The guys at NCC Worship want you to be able to use these songs in your times of worship and in your church, with them showing you two different ways of playing them and how they can work in different settings. Overall this is a solid 5 track album, and I would love to hear more of what these guys are going to bring in the next few years.

Review by Jono Davies

Standout Tracks

• Where Would I Be
• You Alone

www.louderthanthemusic.com

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