tobyMac
I think the best way to describe tobyMac has already been done by someone else:
Take this any way you want, but the fact is that Tobymac is pretty much the Justin Timberlake of the Christian pop set. A refugee from a successful boy band, he is jaw-droppingly talented, with a gift for both butt-kickingly funky grooves and irresistible hooks. Like Timberlake, he also knows how to distribute his hooks, doling them out carefully so as to keep your attention focused; he also possesses the admirable ability to work in a wide variety of styles without ever sounding like a panderer or a dilettante. [allmusic]
But unlike N*Sync, I adored dc Talk’s music.
I kinda missed the whole part where the dc Talk boys went solo. I bought an album by Tait, but never really liked it. And I definitely missed the whole tobyMac thing – knew he was releasing albums and doing well, but never bought the first two or was even really interested.
But if you listen to FM103.2 in Sydney, then you most likely would’ve heard Lose My Soul from his latest album – it seems they like to play it just about every couple of hours. And after hearing it a few times, it really grew on me, and I became quite interested in what the rest of the album would sound like. I jumped on iTunes, and saw the above review, listened to some previews… and decided that I thought it was definitely worth a go.
I’m so glad I did.
The mixture of hip-hop, rock and funk/soul is just incredible and almost perfect. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a couple of tunes that are a bit ho-hum… but on the whole, it’s fantastic. There’s brilliant grooves and hooks, and very, very strong beats. I have had it on repeat in my car just about constantly for the last 7 days since I bought it (thank you iTMS for allowing me to make spontaneous purchases and not having to wait for a trip to Koorong/random CD store). And it is showing no signs of tiring on me yet.
You can’t pin the album down to one genre. But if you tend to just generally enjoy music with a good beat, then you’ll probably enjoy quite a few tracks on this. I sometimes think I’m a closet hip-hop fan, and so I’ve really enjoyed those points on the album too.
Stand out tracks are defintely Boomin’ and Feeling So Fly. And thankfully, those are the two tracks that he’s posted up on his YouTube channel…
edit: And if you’ll look to the right in my Last.fm box, you’ll note how much I have been listening to it… tobyMac on its own is 51 times in the last week. (I need to change all the artist names in iTunes… I don’t like how iTMS has named all the tracks/artists.)