On My Stereo

The Rend Collective Experiment - You Bled (Live @ Momentum 2012)
This is the third Rend Collective song that I've reviewed on here, and this song carries on their great folk melodies. This song is one that you can't help but sing along to - it begins with a lot of harmonious "whoas", which have a quirky tune to them so that it's really fun to sing along. The lyrics of this song are pure and simple: they are about the joy of knowing that Jesus' love is complete, sacrificial, wonderful, marvellous, and for each and every one of us so that we can all declare what it says in the beautifully emotive bridge: "Yes, Jesus loves me". The beat is a heavy one that is pounded out by the loud drumbeat, quite slow but it lends itself well to the soft deliverance of the lyrics. This version of the song is a live version (though there is a studio version on Rend's debut album Organic Family Hymnal) and this song really reveals the benefits of having live versions of worship songs: you can just hear the crowd singing along to every single word; it brings about community, and when you feel like you're part of something like a crowd of worshippers it heightens your emotions to the expressions of the song and you can just lose yourself in it.

Beth Croft - Set A Fire (Live @ Momentum 2012)
This song is kind of a strange song in that it doesn't really have that many lyrics. There are only two verses - or one verse and a chorus, if you will - that are repeated throughout. However, the lyrics are simple yet powerful and when you listen to them you get the feeling that you don't need any other words. They are in the first person, forcing each worshipper to make a personal request to God to "set a fire down in my soul that I can't contain and I can't control"; this can almost be a little scary, and indeed when you let yourself get drawn in by those words you can feel the adrenaline begin to pump through your veins. Yet that same fear is stilled by the fact that to ask for God to do this for us just feels right. What also makes this a wonderful song is the music itself. It starts off slow, complimenting the emotion behind the words and allowing Beth's voice to just flow over the top, but it gets faster as the song progresses. The slowness at the beginning draws you in, then by the time the beat kicks in at the 3 minutes 20 seconds mark, you're hooked: tapping your feet and singing at the top of your voice, just wanting to let yourself go and dance.