The Grants' Bulgaria Blog.

G’day all, Stu here.

We’ve been enjoying lots of new music lately and I was thinking “wouldn’t it be nice to share with people how cool some of this music is?”. Also… I thought it might provide a respite from all our ramblings about culture shock and whatnot if I gave a music review or two.

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Jars of Clay – The Long Fall Back to Earth (2009):

Jars have been one of my favourite bands since they were the coolest new band of 1996 (as voted by our youth group… no wait, that makes them sound way less cool…). At their best they create a quite unique folky alternative-rock. They’re a “Christian” band, but I really respect that they don’t feel compelled to stick to a certain expectation about what a Christian band should sing about.

It’s a long album (14 tracks) and doesn’t have the neat album-narrative of many of their albums (ie. the way that the songs usually follow each other to form a progression of highs and lows – as in a typical story). I’m not sure that’s a bad thing though – it signals new territory.

The instrumental opener is a luxuriant lead-in to Weapons. A killer duo to start an album, I reckon.

There are lots of 80s-retro sounds, which is definitely the in-thing at the moment. I kinda like it. But I still can’t believe that the 80s are cool already.

Jars are at their best when they mellow out, stop trying to write pop songs and sing about grief, loss, doubt etc. I know that sounds morbid, but I think it’s a great relief to hear fellow Christians admit that following Jesus doesn’t solve all of your problems! So much of Christian music seems like emotional escapism compared to the kind of honesty displayed by these guys. The best example of that on this album is the amazing song Headphones:

It’s a heavy world, it’s too much for me to care
If I close my eyes, it’s not there

With my headphones on…

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Another highlight is the closing track (Heart) – a lazy, mellow number with a spine-chillingly succinct message about God:

No mountains to climb, papers to sign

Offer your heart, I’ve given you mine

I love that Scenic Route sounds like Dire Straits. And metaphor of the year goes to Closer, which includes the delightfully poetic:

I don’t understand why we can’t get close enough

I want your kite strings tangled in my trees all wrapped up

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To sum up, I think the album’s great. Not a masterpiece (their last album, Good Monsters, was close), but any shortcomings are at least good attempts to keep experimenting. So I’d recommend it fairly highly.

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In other matters, possibly HUGE news! Or maybe nothing. In any case, we’d appreciate prayer about the possibility of Dave and Kathryn (and therefore us) relocating about 200km away to a village called Sungurlare. This is the neighbouring village to Slavyantsi where were visited Hasan and Emine about 10 days ago. What I didn’t mention in that post was that Hasan essentially invited D+K to move closer to his family so that he and David could do ministry together. It’s nearing decision time!

Tomorrow, David and I (possibly along with Rob, another young Aussie who’s moving to BG in August to work with D+K) are returning to Slavyantsi and the surrounding villages to investigate and ask God about it. Dave’s been praying ferociously about this and expects an answer from God by the end of the week. Great faith; I respect that!

Culturally, this would be a further complete paradigm shift for Elly and I (not to mention Aydin, as well as David and Kathryn). It’s hard to explain just how different it would be. Living in a small village (pop. 3500 compared to Haskovo @ 100,000) gives foreigners like us zero anonymity (ie. if it all gets too much, there’s nowhere to go), and provides a lot more challenges in terms of being seen to be behaving appropriately (ie. Westerners, even if they seem to be “religious”, are simply assumed to be highly immoral by the average Turk/Millet villager – we have to do everything we can to fight that assumption).

On the other hand, this is the work that David and Kathryn are here for, so the difficulties mean nothing if they feel called to Sungurlare! Please pray that God will give any/all of us wisdom in making this decision.

Enough from me,

Say g’day to Uncle Boris for me.

Cheers,

Stu.

ps. completely unrelated, but I know I’ll never share the following photo of wildflowers on the slopes of Mt. Vitosha if I don’t add it now! Enjoy.

Tags: music, prayer points, Reviews

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 11:49 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.