Marvin Sapp Takes On Coldplay, Autotune And Your Expectations

Marvin Sapp
Here I Am
(Verity)

Marvin Sapp’s band doesn’t take a lot of solos, so it’s easy to overlook what an all-out chopsfest his new album is.  Rev. Sapp recorded his eighth solo album, Here I Am, live in front of an enthusiastic Michigan congregation.  Despite some heavy editing and string overdubs, these new songs feel live, a credit more to Sapp and his extraordinary band than to the raucous cheering between tracks.  The instrumentalists excel at dressing up their songs with fills and swells and ebbs and extended codas, creating a swirling space in which Sapp’s vocals take on life of their own.  This music buds, blossoms, flowers, maybe even sprouts.  Not for nothing are they called keyboard “flourishes.”

There are three keyboardists, by the way.  Also a horn section, backup singers, guitar-bass-percussion and the astounding Calvin Rodgers on drums.  Rodgers, who’s drummed for R. Kelly and an array of gospel singers, embodies the strengths of everybody here (except Sapp himself; we’ll get to him).  He can change up the beat on a dime, and he works within the songs’ arrangements to play music that’s constantly shifting, always interesting.  That a band this big can play together; that they can sound like a unified force while improvising extensively–this is all testimony to some heavy-duty rehearsal time.

Not that they’d brag about that; rather, the band would have us see the testimony of Rev. Sapp.  Nearly every song lets him ascend to an impassioned peak of fervor, and some of these peaks are Himalayishly high.  In the middle of “The Best of Me,” a ballad that’s gotten some mainstream R&B airplay, Sapp screams out some strident “Yeah Yeah!!”s that sound as painful as they do glorious.  Then he delivers an improvisational monologue, throws in some fiery “What’d He see?!” exchanges with the backup singers, and ends the song softly, half-speaking, marveling at how God recognizes the best in us, despite what anyone else might see.  The guy’s versatile, too.  In other songs, Sapp builds all the way to the end, or he focuses on his looser lower range, but he rarely sings the same way twice.  He even experiments with a couple tunes in the burgeoning “Autotune” genre.

One of those tunes, “Praise You Forever,” is startling.  It’s a rock song, a blatant imitation of Coldplay’s “Clocks” (Sapp has admitted as much), only it leaves its thudding source material in the dust.  Sapp and the band use their more interesting chords, squiggling synths, and superior drumming ability to create the most gorgeous straight-up praise song so far this year.  It’s almost as though God let “Clocks” happen so that “Praise You Forever” could exist.  Mysterious ways…

Here I Am isn’t perfect.  All the slow songs are programmed together in the middle, which gets a little old, and final song “More Than a Conqueror” is a lesser shuffle that feels tacked on.  (Wild drum fills, though.)  Sapp also focuses on feel-good “Keep Holding On” songs at the expense of challenging “I’m Coming Out of My Comfort Zone” songs.  The theological imbalance isn’t as troubling as the aesthetic imbalance; so much encouragement starts to sound like pandering.  On the other hand, Sapp’s message is undoubtedly true.  “I am thirsting for a touch from you, O Lord,” sing Sapp and his crew, and who among his audience–who in the world–has never felt the same way?  So Sapp conveys God’s reassurance as a refreshing gift, over and over, simply and directly, supported by a church full of ornate gospel, jazz, soul, and rock.  This is directness achieved not through hammerhead simplicity, as in punk, but through opulence.