This is going to be an honest review of the album, if you’d like to hear only positive things about it, you may want to look elsewhere. I also want to mention that this review may be biased because I freaking love Kings Kaleidoscope. They’re seriously my favorite Christian band, so I hold them to a pretty high standard. If you need proof of my love for Kings, check out my best lesser known Christian bands post.
After the band released Enchanted and Dust / Ride on Reprise, I got pretty excited because those songs are great. Not to mention the fact that Becoming Who We Are is one of my favorite albums ever. It was foolish of me, but I assumed that Beyond Control would be as good, or at least close to their previous album.
Let’s get into some of the specifics about the album. I don’t want to go through all 13 tracks, but here are my thoughts on some of them. And as a spoiler, I’ll let you know that I enjoyed 9 out of the 13 tracks.
A Resting Place–the intro to the album–is borderline irritating. I don’t really think it adds anything good to the album. I honestly cringed a little when I first heard A Resting Place, though admittedly I did have the volume up pretty loud.
The second song in the album is Enchanted and it’s a really great song. It’s probably my second favorite of the album after Dust, which is the fourth track. The next song after Enchanted is Most Of It and ironically, most of it is ok. The one part that I really couldn’t look past is the background vocals. You’d have to listen to it for yourself to know what I mean, but they add a certain KIDZ BOP-esque quality that I find repulsive. Of course the lead vocals and tune–as always with KK–are on point.
I already touched on the next track (Dust), but Dust is followed by Ride on Reprise which is essentially just a 1 minute extension of Dust and I thought it was nice. Now let’s move onto In This Ocean, Pt. I and II. They are definitely unique, but I liked them pretty well.
I don’t want to critique A Prayer too much because I know it’s a pretty personal song, but I thoroughly did not enjoy listening to it. And no, the f-bomb didn’t bother me at all.
Some other songs that I really liked from Beyond Control are: In This Ocean Pt. I and II, Sabotage / Home, Lost? and a Trackless Sea.
It’s pretty hard not to like some of the songs even though they aren’t perfect. Chad Gardner’s voice is always ridiculously good. So even though a song may not be constructed masterfully, they still sound ok for the most part.
In summary I think Beyond Control is overall a slightly messy, half-baked album. Even so, there are some really great songs on this album; particularly Dust, Enchanted, and Gone. I enjoyed 7 out of the 13 tracks, so more than I still love Kings Kaleidoscope and I look forward to their next release.