Christian Family Underground sounds much like the name indicates: they create a large, deeply weird communal music. While you listen to it you’re reminded of some various hippie freakouts and other happenings. The electronic effects and percussion lead you to few other points of reference. Unfortunately, they tend to veer into meaningless chants quite a bit. For me the chants felt a bit forced, and some of the instrumentation sounded like it was deliberately trying to conjecture up a particular decade, time and era.
The shorter, non-chant pieces work best for me. “Let’s Go Deeper” and “Let’s Receive Love” are two of my favorites off of this album. For the first, it has a fuzzed out guitar which constantly shifts in and out of focus. A very simple concept but it works wonders in dragging you in and out of the sound. “Let’s Receive Love” has a nice expansive sound. Using only a few details, it manages to sound quite threatening.
Most of the songs on here have too many unnecessary details. The percussion on “Energies Increase” ruins most of my enjoyment of that song. Removing the ringing, chintzy bells could’ve made it a whole lot more effective. On “You are Source, Source is You” which takes up half the disc, I enjoyed parts of this song enormously. I know all songs must evolve, but the shift into a guttural chant around the seven minute mark ruins all the tension they had built up so delicately before that moment.
Basically, this might have greatly improved with some editing, some removal of sounds that didn’t work, and minimalizing the nods to hippie culture (not all of it needed to be removed, but the chants and bongos felt like a bit much). Overall though, this is an interesting album.
