What a contrast.Imagine this. You're a well known worship leader with a heart to see stadiums used as worship venues. Your recent albums have been specifically tailored to provide music for such events, and over the last few years, you've relentlessly toured the country filling church halls and small venues building momentum for your plan. Then, after much planning and hard work, you fill Wembley Stadium. Then what?
If you're Noel Richards, you make a plan to hold a similar event in Berlin. Then, you get to work on your next album. But what it should it be like? You've done two albums of rousing stadium-style songs, so do you do another, or do you aim for something slightly more mature? The mature option is a sensible one, as there's a new wave of younger worship leaders snapping at your heels. So, a couple of years on, 'Calling All Nations' is released.
I'm not massively sure how the album came into my collection, but I'd not listened to it for a long time, a very long time. It's not great. It bobs along very tastefully, but there's nothing of any real excitement, and nothing that hadn't been done already, or wasn't being done better by someone else. I'd love to say there was some kind of saving grace - a really good song tucked away at the end, or a great arrangement, but... there's nothing. Even a guest vocal from Matt Redman sounds like it's being phoned in. By the end of the album, I was checking each track to see it it was the last one - never a good sign. It's a shame, because Richards was clearly passionate about what he was doing, and working with all the best intentions. You just can't really hear it.
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