Good Morning to you! My name is Jacob Braybrooke, and its time for you to hesitantly place your minty fine After Eight’s back into the cupboard despite your temptations since the actual day hasn’t arrived yet, as we ‘Countdown To Christmas’ with another festive post on the blog, because it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! If you’re a fan of the ‘Pitch Perfect’ films – here’s something that Yule possibly find to be ‘Aca-Awesome’. ‘The Prayer’ is a cover version of the 1998 relaxed duet tune made famous by Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli, later covered by Paradise & Anthony Callea to notable reviews. The most recent version, however, comes from the A-capella group of Pentatonix who were formed back in Arlington, Texas during 2011 who won the sixth season of NBC’s ‘The Sing Off’ on US TV and scored a lucrative $200,000 record deal with Sony Music to reward their time. Although I can recall little of their material, I seem to think Pentatonix are a pretty famous group in popular culture. I’d heard their name before researching away for ‘The Prayer’ and I know that most of their music is also Christian Contemporary. Their YouTube channel has over 19 million subscribers and their videos have over 5 billion views, and the act have won three Grammy awards, having become the first A Capella project to win ‘Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Capella’ in 2015 and 2016. They are no strangers to releasing seasonal albums, but ‘Evergreen’ is their latest yuletide album release and their tenth LP record overall. Let’s check out the lead single below.
The former holders of the #1 spot on Billboard’s Independent Albums Chart for a time in 2013, Pentatonix got into the festive spirit pretty early, having released ‘Evergreen’ on October 29th via RCA Records and promoted it with a performance of ‘The Prayer’ with hopeful contestant Victory Brinker on ‘America’s Got Talent’ recently. The band also announced a new Christmas tour to go with the album that is currently running, and they will be taking their intimate live sets to US venues in Kentucky, Illinois and Minnesota later this month. In what feels like the most painful and obvious statement that I’ve written on the blog all year round, because that’s the point of the genre, the emphasis is purely on the vocal performance and the verbal delivery of the lyrics here, just to get our discussion about ‘The Prayer’ rolling. Opening up with a spacious set of long harmonies, the band lead the faithful anthem with “I pray you’ll be our eyes/And watch us where we go” as the 5-piece match up the religious context of the lyrics to the spacious backing harmonies that back Mitch Grassi’s lead up. Hopeful lyrics like “Guide us with your grace/To a place where we’ll be safe” and “A world where pain and sorrow will be ended/And every heart that’s broken will be mended” hope to put the ‘Christ’ into ‘Christmas’ as the band members all trade exchanges between each other, with reverberated bass patterns created from their tenor voices creating an operatic backdrop for the optimistic songwriting. Some extra variety is added to the sounds when the band member Scott Hoying sings the Italian lyrics of Bocelli to complement the backing vocals of Kirstin Maldonaldo and Kevin Olusola who take the position of Celine Dion in retrospect, as he hits the notes with a sense of fragility that makes the track feel produced quite delicately. ‘The Prayer’ has a nice blend of Soul and Classical to it that has a pleasant theme to it, and although the production risks feeling a tad bit commercial at times, Pentatonix sell it decently and it feels like it is adding a new twist to the original track, a goal that all of the most effective cover versions of older records should strive to achieve. I can’t claim to know the technical aspects of A Capella, but I still enjoyed hearing this. Ripe for the season.
That’s enough of testing out our voices for one day! Thank you for checking out the blog today, it is very highly appreciated, and I finally get a day off from writing a post everyday on the blog tomorrow because a very special guest who lives in the North Pole will be taking over the weekly ‘Scuzz Sundays’ feature throughout December. His 1st selection comes from another Christian Contemporary group whose lead vocalist Matt Thiessen was a co-producer for Owl City’s 2012 album ‘The Midsummer Station’.
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