Latest christian music:Strip away the doom-laden guitars, howl of vocals and chest-rattling bass, and you'll find God in Underoath.
"Good God, if your song leaves our lips, if your work leaves our hands, then we will be wanderers and vagabonds," you can make out Spencer Chamberlain singing in one of the quieter moments of the metal band's current album, "Lost in the Sound of Separation."
"I'm as Christian as you can be," says bassist Grant Brandell tracing his beliefs back to age 13. "It's definitely the foundation of our band. . . . It's not just an onstage thing."
Oh, if only it were that easy. Underoath, which plays Tuesday as part of the Warped Tour bill at Verizon Wireless Music Center, has emerged from Florida as one of the premier metal bands of the moment, dominating a genre of music that is frequently seen as anything but Christian. And the relentless touring, with so many temptations at hand, so many easy choices to be made, can test a man.
"Just because you're a Christian," Brandell says, "doesn't mean you can't go through things that are not ideal." Metal is a visceral experience. Brandell has witnessed shows get out of hand, with crowds pushing barricades, "people getting beat up, people going nuts, getting hurt. And offstage, all of the backstage antics."
Underoath members have toured alongside the likes of Slipknot, Mastodon, Disturbed and Dragonforce -- enough to test the mettle of this Christian metal band.
"You can take an art, like music, you can use it for any cause," Brandell says. "Metal definitely has an aggressive sound to it, it has an angry sound to it. Angry. Bad. Evil. At the same time, it's a powerful thing.
"We've had people come up and thank us, and we have people who think we're hypocrites. It's just how people perceive metal."
Underoath isn't immune to the volcanic nature of metal. In 2006, it was reportedly simmering with internal strife over, of all things, religious disagreements. That, and what the band at first denied but now concedes is true, that Chamberlain had a cocaine problem.
"He wasn't happy," Brandell says. "He obviously didn't want to be doing it."
In "Desperate Times Desperate Measures," Chamberlain sings of how "I've been crawling around in the dark for a while."
In time, Underoath has healed and fans have stuck with the band: "Lost in the Sound of Separation" debuted at No. 8 on Billboard magazine's Top 200 albums chart.
Christian Music News Source
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