'Holding Nothing Back' by Tim Hughes

A quirk of alphabetical filing takes me from one Tim Hughes album to another, skipping over ‘When Silence Falls’ (which I’m not going to get to for a long time at this rate). By the time of this, his third album, Hughes’ situation had changed significantly. No longer was he the new face on the scene, snapping at the heels of Matt Redman – he’d already become a major figure in Christian music, and not just in Britain.

The development in sound between ‘Here I Am To Worship’ and this are fairly obvious when you listen to them back to back. The arrangements are clearer and more muscular here, and Hughes’ voice – which had always been strong – is in very fine form. There is a sprinkling of new anthems throughout the album – the title track, and ‘Almighty God’ and ‘Happy Day’, for instance, and there other very strong moments – ‘Clinging To The Cross’ is lovely, and ‘God Of Justice’ is delicately arranged. There are other moments, especially towards the end of the album, where Hughes falls into the almost unavoidable trap of the worship songwriter – writing songs which wouldn’t quite work congregationally, but aren’t quite distinctive enough to make it on their own. The material is good enough to get through this problem, but it’s a problem never-the-less.