A Little Review of KINDNESS IS SOLID STONE, VIOLENCE IS A HEAVY LOAN TO PAY

Brand New Album by David Benjamin Blower

I’ve been listening to David Benjamin Blower's Birmingham UK voice (sung, spoken, and written) for at least a year now and was delighted to see his brand new album, Kindness Is Solid Stone, Violence Is a Heavy Loan to Pay, appear on Bandcamp last night before I headed to bed. I’ve been sitting with it on and off all day today and have written down a few thoughts to encourage you to check out and consider this delicious and nutritious collection of new and renewed originals. Here goes.

"Finger in the Wind" appears to be based on Isaiah 40. The word finger in this song--its tone, its sustainedness, and the harmony lifting and carrying it--recalls me to a tempetuous day and the wind racing through the eaves holding up my roof.

"Kindness Is Solid Stone" riffs on what translators of the Bible into English have generally rendered as kingdom of God parables, but in this song they are lyrically clarified (made clear or purified by freeing from suspended matter, per Merriam-Webster's) as illustrations of "the Way" (for example, the Way is like "a little bird / ... perched without worry," "a little seed / lost in the dirt of becoming," and "the child who is / unseen amidst adults' plans"). In our present world, in which it is often hard to notice any solid kindness amidst the weight of widespread, callous violence and "another round of futile waste," the song offers that "there may," still, nevertheless, "come a day" when "the proud" will grasp what destruction they have wrought, what hell they have built; then "the gentle shall wipe" their tears: an extrordinary hope in a world that is "a shell of the real thing."

For someone easily prone to catching earworms (like me), "Now we Gaze into a Mirror" provides five minutes of layered sung words from 1 Corinthians 13, some of them stretched around and beyond the melody like echoes, and gently plucked string instruments that have already claimed a home in my head.

"No Debts. No Masters. No Laws. No Caesars." secures its six lines of repeated lyrics to the listener's mind with a reverberating drumbeat that, when the voices and other instruments fade out, continues almost alone for a full minute, like a mother's heartbeat to a child not yet born. In fact, in the middle of last night I awoke and couldn't fall back asleep until I listened to this track several times.

"The Rain Not the Thunder." These lyrics are worth meditating on: "It's the rain, not the thunder, that makes the flowers bloom."

"Gather Round the Table O My Enemies" is an upbeat hymn to the vision in "Kindness Is Solid Stone" of "the gentle" wiping away the tears of "the proud." It invites all of us to celebrate together even as we acknowledge "why we did what we did and "why we said what we said." The second and third verses seem to me like what Job would have done and said after repenting of his own ignorance about God and while praying for and gathering with his friends who had "not spoken the truth" about God. (Indeed, I think there is more of Job in this album than I originally recognized.)

"Empty Themselves" is distilled from Romans 12 and is a call to humility. It is another whose lyrics and rhythms will easily become earworms.

"Meet Me Where I Sing and Stamp My Feet" feels to me like the most personal song on the album. A heart-opening prayer. It will be that for me.

"Covers. Believes. Holds. Stays." The final song on the album is also extracted from 1 Corinthians 13 and is another one that I will turn to at night for its heartbeat and its voices (human and otherwise).

You may listen to and purchase this treasure at the following link: