The Hymn Revolution

You may or may not be aware, but hymns are back. This has been the case in the USA for a while, what with Indelible Grace Music, Red Mountain Music, Sojourn and, most recently, Page CXVI hitting the Christian music scene, along with the various Mars Hill Seattle bands who have helped resurrect "Jesus Paid It All", "What Wondrous Love Is This" and various other hymns which are now standards in churches across the English-speaking world.

Now, the return of hymns to worship services is one thing. Given that the shift has occurred mostly, perhaps exclusively, in evangelical churches, it is not so surprising that this should have happened. Hymns typically had more theologically solid lyrics than much of what has been sung in churches for the last couple of decades, and so a rediscovery of Isaac Watts, John Newton, William Cowper and Charles Wesley, among others, is really only to be expected in churches eager to boost the theology of their worship music. What makes bands like Sojourn so unique is the fact that, as well as helping get hymns back on the church-singing map (Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky is one of the leaders in the movement), they use their studio releases to help turn hymns into a credible musical genre for the twenty-first century.

Does that sound impossible to you? If so, it may seem highly unlikely that two nights ago a group of young Christian guys from Melbourne would have gathered on the stage of the Gershwin Room at the Espy Hotel in St Kilda to play, almost exclusively, eighteenth and nineteenth century hymns revitalised as swirling sixties rock songs. They call themselves The Anti-Fall Movement, a name that has unintentional echoes of now defunct hard-core band Against the Fall, but it would be wrong to think that they in any way resemble the latter band. Their SoundCloud page describes their music as "Gospel Blues Stadium Rock" and this, strange a combination though it might seem, captures their sound quite aptly.

Thursday night saw the launch of their debut album, "Away My Needless Fears", named after the Charles Wesley hymn which concludes the twelve-track album. Aside from Wesley, most of the hymn-writers are unknown today, and only two of the hymns played, "Green Hill" ("There Is a Green Hill Far Away") and "My Life Flows On" (more commonly known as "How Can I Keep From Singing?"), were familiar to me before I heard the album. In this respect, The Anti-Fall Movement stick fairly wisely to the same ploy used by bands like Red Mountain Music and Sojourn - in reviving now-unknown hymns, they avoid the awkwardness of trying to make well-known hymns seem new. (Bands like Page CXVI and King's Kaleidoscope manage fairly well, but it's still a challenging task. Think, for instance, of how the otherwise excellent Indelible Grace Music struggled to make Wesley's "Amazing Love" sound any different to the million other versions out there. And the next band to take on "Come Thou Fount" may as well give up the quest for originality before they even begin.)

In this regard, The Anti-Fall Movement are probably one of the most successful bands in seamlessly shifting hymns into their new form. Front-men Peter Carolane and Paul Davies are such slick song-writers, and so in love with the style they are working in, that the songs sound utterly assured in their new incarnations. In some cases - "When We Cannot See", "Take Them All", "The River" - it's hard to believe that they themselves did not write everything, lyrics and all (excluding, that is, the occasional "thee" or archaisms such as "it is not meet that we should fear"). The band also made the very wise choice of releasing the album on vinyl (it cost only $10 extra on entry to get both a record and CD of the album), a touch which is both in keeping with the retro-charm of the whole enterprise and also a completely sensible move artistically: there is a wonderful warmth to every track that can only fully be captured on vinyl. In the case of most tracks, listening to it on vinyl feels suspiciously like discovering a 60s classic that you never knew existed. I suspect that may have been their thinking.

Knowing most of the members of the band, I'm not without bias. But then I'm also a fan of what we might call the New Hymns Movement (a movement which, interestingly, the Anti-Fall guys seem largely unaware exists; Paul expressed surprise to me when I mentioned to him last year that I knew a few other bands that did something similar). Yet once you've heard enough of the bands that fit into this category it's easy enough to feel like it's hard to do something new in this realm. (See above note on the 7 billion versions of "Come Thou Fount".) The Anti-Fall Movement go beyond what you could possibly expect. You may well forget that you are listening to hymns. You may also forget which decade you are living in. You will probably forget most things other than the music and the wonderful truths that each word will fill your head with. And for that they stand out, not only for being, at present, the main Australian band doing what they do, but for making the form something new and compelling, and something which works so perfectly for them.