A Review of Jeremy Riddle's "The Now and Not Yet"

Album Release Date: March 3, 2009

Rating: 3.5/5

Back in 2006, it was pretty much impossible not to hear Jeremy Riddle’s “Sweetly Broken” off his debut album, Full Attention. I thoroughly enjoyed that song for its simplified beauty. It was a great worship song built around an acoustic guitar and a message of reliance upon God. Other than that song, however, I hadn’t been exposed to any of Riddle’s music, so I didn’t have much in the way of expectations when I sat down to listen to The Now and Not Yet, his latest album released back in March.

My first impression: if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Jeremy Riddle is extremely genuine and U2 should be extremely flattered. The similarities, from the atmospheric guitars, loud drums, and even the vocal style, the music sounds very familiar to that of the Dublin, Ireland rockers. It’s not extremely pronounced on every song, but some are just uncanny. “Prepare the Way of the Lord,” in particular, was a great song, but I found it difficult to not try and pick out all the U2-ness in it. By placing that track as the second song on the album, I was pre-disposed to view remaining songs through that lens.

I don’t necessarily think this is a horrible thing. After all, what’s really worse: an artist that is able to pretty successfully re-create the general sound of one of the greatest bands in history, or one that simply sounds pretty much like every other act out there? I’ll take Riddle’s approach over another generic pop/rock band in most cases, because, as I said, the song-writing and execution here is very good, even if it’s somewhat derivative.

“Christ is Risen” was a great opener and a song that I’m sure was used powerfully in many Easter morning services this past year. Other favorites included “Among the Poor,” which explores the meaning of Christ’s words that what we do for the poor we’ve done for him. I also really enjoyed “The One and Only,” with its powerful depiction of Isaiah 53, as well as “Joyful Noise,” which I’m sure goes over extremely well in a corporate worship setting. Possibly my favorite song, though, was “Prayer for the Church,” with its prayerful challenge to the bride of Christ to start acting like She should. Powerful.

While the album does contain a few forgettable songs, these are not the norm, as the music is powerful with Christ-exalting, God-honoring lyrics. There is solid worship here, with a good mix of non-worship tunes, demonstrating Riddle’s versatile song-writing ability. He mostly won me over with this consistency and almost made me forget he sounds like U2 making a worship album.