Stryper
Second Coming

Crusaders with a mission to spread christianity to the metal or rock world, that is what Stryper is. They are considered to be the most prolific christian rock band out there, at least according to what I have read while researching this band whom I have never heard before this album. The reason for that might of course be that I avoid religious bands to as big an extent as I can as religion is the root to all evil in this world, but of course in my role as an impartial reviewer I have to overlook that aspect and instead focus on the music. But what about this album called The Second Coming? It is one with rerecordings of fourteen classic songs from the band, and they throw in a pair of newly written songs just for the fun of it. So in a way this would be a great album for me as it is a good way getting to know this band, but then I tend to hate compilations as they usually are quite useless mixed tapes of songs that don’t belong together as an album and I hate mixed tapes and shuffled playlists. But of course I will not let that one cloud my judgement as well, I have listened to this album without prejudice because I did not know about their religious stuff or that it was old songs before reading the info just now. Well the religious bit I heard due to their praise Jesus song, which I absolutely hate by the way.

Musically they can be described as something of a glam metal thing, but also melodic rock is a suitable description as it is built on a melodic foundation with catchy choruses and all of that. It is the vocals that are more in line with the glam stuff, they are not good and they give almost a bad feeling kind of like they were sung by an imp or something like that. Terrible. The performances otherwise are quite good, nothing to complain about in terms of the songs and the melodies. The production is okay, nothing special and you could say that the album in terms of sound and all of that is quite average for the genre. The album offers a bit of variation considering that the songs come from different albums and such but not enough to really manage to keep a non-Stryper fan interested for the entire playing time which is well over the hour. The religious lyrics is not taking up too much room for most of the time, in some songs they are quite disturbing but most of the time you do not think of the christian stuff which is good if they want to reach a wider non-fundamentalist audience.

All in all this album is acceptable in that it is listenable, the vocals are quite poor but the rest is quite okay. There is nothing definitively wrong with this album, there are little things like the long playing time and the fact that they are recycling old songs, granted there are two new songs but overall it is old ones recycled so anyone who has listened to the band will know these and from what I have been able to gather on the interweb they are not very different from the originals. The album is average, I think you could call it mediocre as it is not really an album that feels interesting and I am not saying that because of the christian message the crusade for it is annoying in one or two of the songs and in the rest it is not something you think of, which is like I stated earlier.

I suppose that if you are a fan of the band or want to get to know them it is a good album, it is not a total dog of an album but neither is it something I would spend my hard earned cash on. I would say that if you are looking for some good music to spend your money on, this isn’t it as there is a whole load of better album already released in 2013, so I chose one of them and let Stryper continue their crusade in the name of a murderous god someplace else.

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