Review: Wake Up the World, Gateway Church
June 2, 2008
If you’re anything like me, you found Gateway Church’s last album, Living for You a pretty solid album to pull from in your church. With songs like “You, You Are God” and “Revelation Song,” Living proved to be an excellent breakout project from the Southlake, Texas-based megachurch and certainly padded this worship leader’s bag of tricks with some great new tunes.
Their new release, Wake Up the World is not exactly a blast-off follow-up, catapulting into the stratosphere. It’s more like a bottle rocket petering out just an inch above the last album. It’s not terrible, it’s not amazing, it’s just okay. Don’t get me wrong, there are several REALLY good songs on this album, most of them featuring Kari Jobe. Those tracks include:
- New Doxology- A great reworking of a classic hymn that is (in my opinion) superior to the David Crowder remake.
- The Lord Reigns- Originally recorded by the Christ for the Nations Institute on the Overtaken album. Quite frankly, their version is better.
- You Are Good- Two words: Kari Jobe. Probably the best song on the album.
- Alabaster Jar- I’ve tagged the bridge from this song to three different worship songs already. It’s a good tune (also originally recorded by CFNI on the Overtaken album and also better there).
Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not that this album is not worth your time, because it is. It’s just that I’m a perturbed that most of the songs on this album that I liked, I liked because I heard them done better on another album by another worship band. I have to wonder how I’d feel about this album if it didn’t feature the shining beacon of Kari Jobe’s pure-as-springwater sorprano.
El Ben’s rating: 3.5 out of 5
The Final Word: El Ben sez buy this album. At the end of the day, it’s really worth it.
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Very solid CD. We’ve done the New Doxology a couple of times and it’s gone over well. And I could listen to Kari Jobe sing the phone book and I’d buy it.
Your Review of this CD is quite honest, but somehow I feel you missed something interesting. You mention how several of the songs on this album were originally CFNI songs, this was also true of the last album, Living For you. Infact the title Track, Living For You, was taken From CFNI’s Upside Down album. Also, ‘You, You are God’ ‘Revelation Song’ ‘The More I Seek You’ and many others were originally CFNI.
This is a feature that will continue most likely. This is because Kari Jobe and the entire rest of the Gateway Worship Team are former CFNI Students. They were and in some cases still are songwriters for both CFNI and Gateway.
The reason the CFNI versions will almost always sound better simply because they have more pieces to their band. (i.e. Strings, Brass, and Full Scale Chorus.)
Over all a Good Review, but it comes across semi condescending, I hope this sheds a new light on it.