Contemporary Christian music of all stripes has a pretty bad reputation.

I'm not about to try to change that. Heck no. Absolutely not. Most examples of Christian rock/rap/metal that I've heard are pretty much the stereotype - not every song which name-drops Jesus or talks about God or one's faith or anything, mind, but the kind of music made for an explicitly church audience. Which probably makes it sound like the problem - I'm an atheist (or close enough; I guess certain particularly obscure circumstances might make me believe in God), sure, and not likely to seek out openly-religious media, but it's not like I'm the sort of person who actively shrinks from anything that's too openly religious. Instead, it's because "Christian rock" (as it existed a few decades ago at least) is the result of an explicitly conservative religious movement. As a consequence, this particular subset of rock music is retrograde - because the newest thing is inherently Satanic until something new comes along to be the actual Devil's [medium] (i.e. just because they decided rock-and-roll wasn't Satanic, the church had already moved on to making their Satanic Panic be about something newer, so playing old-school country rock only vaguely constitutes getting with the times), and it lacks bite, because making it too edgy would also be Satanic. In short: what little of this kind of music I know is rather boring.

Meanwhile, less-conservative Christians just make regular rock and roll. I don't have terribly up-to-date statistics, but I'm pretty sure a good more-than-a-quarter of the world's population is some flavor of Christian. Even aside from that, themes of difficulties in life such as crises of faith or thinking you've seen evil are pretty universal experiences that even a committed atheist can find resonance in.

So, let's have a look at a group that made a switch and defied the traditional norms of contemporary Christian music, both bringing a fairly up-to-date sound and making something that could just as easily find an audience outside of CCM.

Daniel Amos is a band from California, originally signing with the Calvary Chapel association for the course of two albums, where they started as a straightforward country group and gradually got... weirder. By 1978 they had a third album released, called Horrendous Disc, before Calvary Chapel's label Maranatha! Music decided to change tack entirely, dropping all their rock-and-roll and similar acts. Attempts to release the album on Solid Rock Records resulted in multiple years of messy record-label shenanigans and... to put it succinctly, the group kept on going to such an extent that the album came out all of a few weeks before the actual object of our discussion today.

Horrendous Disc saw the group broadening their horizons a bit, already flirting with rock music and the like on previous album Shotgun Angel, but now displaying a diversified portfolio of interests from the 70s. However, ¡Alarma!, their fourth studio album, went even further, bringing in (gasp!) up-to-date sounds, producing a very treble-y new-wave (at times post-punk) album that turned its focus toward the Church itself, particularly its hypocrisies and how much people claim to believe in the word of God but do nothing to make it clear that they actually do. (Those of you who are thinking that perhaps it says something that what I hail as an example of Christian rock I actually like is sticking it to "bad Christians" ... er, I do like that one Jars of Clay song? Actually, if you're a Christian and you're pointing this out, you probably think Jars of Clay are basically apostates after Dan Hazeltine said something not-horrible about gay people once. I remember people being seriously upset about that. Way to break the stereotype, those guys!)

I suppuse I don't know what I expected out of this album. I figured it would be interesting, because what little I knew about the group was that Terry Scott Taylor (the lead singer and primary songwriter for the group) had a reputation of being whip-smart with a biting sense of humor, but I'm not sure I had real guesses on what the quality would be like. But it definitely ended up being really good!

Alarma is an album you could just as easily listen to and, outside a few tracks, not be convinced that very much of it is specifically about religious matters. A particular one is "Endless Summer," something like a rumination on California and maybe ennui, filled with no small amount of references to the Beach Boys and various musical adjuncts (hey, "Dead Man's Curve"! I know that one!). But of course, a lot of it is still about their beliefs. The most obvious point where the album is about Christianity (i.e. the belief in the teachings of Jesus as recounted by the Bible) is, fittingly, on "Central Theme." The most obvious point where the album is about Christianity (i.e. the church and organized faith, as organizations claiming to consist of believers and not always actually being those who believe in the teachings of Jesus as recounted by the Bible, especially in the leadership) is "Colored By." The former is pretty straightforward in its description of the moral code described in the Bible as important. The latter is about how church leadership can use their claimed belief in God as a cudgel to suppress culture, twisting the Word to tell people that various things they personally dislike are sinful, in particular referencing a moral panic surrounding music with a strong beat. "Props" also stars churchgoers as literal cardboard cutouts, so flat and lifeless in their belief in nothing. "Big Time/Big Deal" stars a guy who wants to be a famous preacher known all over the world, giving a certain vibe of the narrator wanting to be a Joel Osteen type. Then there's "My Room," featuring a shut-in who only leaves their room to go to another room with all the other people who only leave their room to go there - more or less a jab at closed-minded Christians who won't socialize outside of the church group. It's... an acerbic album to say the least. But as you can tell, it's a hopeful one at times. One last explicitly Christian-related song for the road; "Hit Them" is (a title that probably shouldn't be so short, because it suggests a different subject matter, but also) a song about how one can practice what they preach to show God's love and ultimately create a better world. Meanwhile, on "Through the Speakers," they struggle with how to get their message across in a way that wouldn't be considered off-putting.

Conservative Christianity, above all else, is insular; this means that a lot of people tune out CCM by virtue of a lack of applicability. This album sees Daniel Amos trying to be a bit more friendly to other audiences (something they had tried a couple times before), even if much of the subject matter would mostly be of interest to the faithful (and in the case of songs dunking on the less-positive aspects of the Church, gawping outsiders who enjoy when the Church has a bad time). I know I just spent however many lines up there talking about all the songs that are about Jesus and Christianity specifically, but the title track and "Faces to the Window" are, I think, pretty good examples of something more applicable to a general audience. Though they both deal explicitly with the beliefs of other Christians, they're also just generally about people turning a blind eye to the suffering of the world; not explicitly a Christian message on the surface, and something that I actually fits in with the punk/post-punk/new-wave paradigm that D.A. seeks to follow on this album. Even past that, we have some songs that aren't just about how the world sucks to help vary things up a little bit. One of the most obvious of which is "Shedding the Mortal Coil," which is about... well, shedding the mortal coil. Complete with slightly disturbing music. It slots right in alongside other new-wave and post-punk records, maybe even qualifying as a little sideways of goth stuff specifically. Definitely an off-beat choice for this genre!

There are, however, a few flaws, one of which is in the sound. While it's not impossible that Alarma does this on purpose, it's mostly lacking in bass. The results aren't so much shrill as they are really, really thin. At times they just kind of feel very, very unfinished and significantly lighter than they intend to. It becomes a really stark contrast when something like "Endless Summer" shows up, because that has a very classic punk-rock vibe to it, which ends up just making a lot of the rest of the album feel even lighter than it already does. This album is at times something that feels oddly gentle for how acidic its tongue is (which there is a place for) and for the genre overall, the latter of which occasionally makes the music feel a little more tentative or unsure of itself, as opposed to certain other infamous albums with crap bass (e.g. Metallica's ...And Justice for All, where it's clearly an artistic decision, albeit a monstrously stupid one). This is one of the fairly few things I can hold against the album, but it's pretty big. Worse yet because this is something that is extremely focused on lyrics, but the vocals are often a little hard to discern (and not in the Devo/early Oingo Boingo way where the singer is intentionally pulling a goofy voice). It does drag the album down a little, but it's mostly from like an A to a B-plus at worst.

...and of course, one last thoroughly mean-spirited, needlessly snide remark (don't take it as an actual insult, it's just a very easy joke). Future member Greg Flesch once lamented how being in Christian music meant you had to "play these same cheesy licks three years after the secular world" - and as much as Alarma is a record that's pretty up-to-date, it is coming deep enough into new-wave's lifespan that it isn't the "new" sound anymore. A lot of the formative albums had been around a few years by then. In fact, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO!, perhaps the album that seems like (aside from how extremely bleak its outlook is; D.A. are still hopeful people who want a better world, while in this era, Devo really seemed like sullen nihilists) it would inspire Terry Scott Taylor the most out of this movement, was... three years old.

It's not exactly a truly innovative record (outside the part where contemporary Christian music was so incredibly retrograde that this seemed fresh by comparison in 1981), but it's a record that I think deserves a few kinds of respect. Not only is it actually good (even when the mix seems to fool you into believing otherwise), it's a genuine effort at reaching across the aisle that isn't unlistenable and usually understands the problems that this kind of music has reaching people like me (and a large amount of music-listeners in general). One of these days I really need to get around to listening to the other Alarma Chronicles albums. Oh, yeah, did I mention that? This album was made as the first in a quartet of albums called The ¡Alarma! Chronicles, skewering the worst parts of the church, negotiating with cold-war fears and one's own mortality, and generally professing a strong love for William Blake (his works come up a lot in the Alarma Chronicles). Ambition that is well and truly worthy of praise, especially since they actually pulled it off.

I just kinda hope Terry Scott Taylor is hip enough to realize that the guy who made The Neverhood (which he contributed to the soundtrack to) is a real piece of trash.