Sports

		List Price: $13.98		Publisher: Word Entertainment Salesrank: 97024 Released: 2004-07-27
		Our Price:
		Availibility: Costumer Rating:

Tracklisting:
1. All This Time
2. Rubberhouse
3. Outrageous
4. No Other One
5. When I Fall
6. Being Alive
7. You Never Know
8. The Good Life
9. Honest
10. The Art
11. Room

Customer Reviews:
Wicked Awesome!
This is Rachael’s best CD yet. It shows her incredible range and versatility. It is a must have!

A Terrible Waste
Rachael Lampa may be the finest pop singer on the planet. Or, should I say, Rachael Lampa could have been the finest pop singer on the planet. These are heady words, indeed. Her debut album, recorded as she turned fifteen, brimmed with confidence and maturity far beyond her years. It truly was a vocal masterpiece, still used as a model by vocal instructors. The songs were personally crafted by some of the finest singer-songwriters in the Christian music world exclusively for her, to maximize her range and ability.

Towards the end of the first album cycle, Rachael went on tour with Christian boy band Plus One, and her good friend, Stacie Orrico. This fateful tour was to prove the beginning of the end of Rachael’s career. Rachael began to succumb to the pressure of her peers, and instead of celebrating what only she could do and no one else could touch, she longed to be more ‘age-appropriate’ and relevant to teens. Stacie Orrico was an artist of many gifts- an ability to communicate with her audience being one, and dancing being another. She is a good singer-not great, but very good. Rachael Lampa could do one thing well-sing. She was not a dancer. She was an awkward communicator. But she was an untouchable singer.

It is hard enough to make it in the music business when everything is perfectly aligned. Rachael got it in her head that she needed to move closer to the Stacie Orrico model, which downplayed her overwhelming strength and played up her glaring weakness. Her 2nd album was a transition- still written specifically for her voice and featuring many great vocal moments, but veering more towards her age-group. Rachael also began to, understandably, want to have more of a say in her lyrical content. The result was mixed-a good but not great effort.

The upheavals at her record company, Word Records, were to have a further harmful effect on Rachael’s career. She then made an ill-conceived album of remixes, ‘Blur’, which really represented a major step backwards for the talented diva. This was the beginning of the sublimation of her vocal to the noise of flashy hip-hop production. The result was to render Rachael as a nearly anonymous player on her own CD. There are hundreds of records like ‘Blur’, most of which feature disposable singers who at least can dance.

This brings us, sadly, to Rachael’s latest, and maybe, last record. Produced by the extraordinarily-talented Tommy Sims, the record could well have been titled, ‘Tommy Sims, featuring Rachael Lampa’. Gone are the songs that were crafted for Rachael’s particular gifts. Rachael once again has been sadly reduced to the status of normality, of mediocrity; another female hip-hop R&B singer in a vast sea of female hip-hop/R&B singers. What a tragic waste. Sims did a great job for anybody not named Rachael Lampa, but he utterly failed to take into account the unique gifts that made Rachael the stand-alone talent that she is. This mistake was no doubt driven by Racheal and her peers, who have the dubious distinction of helping drive her career straight into the ground. (With friends like these…) This problem was exacerbated by having absolutely no career help from anyone in a position of authority in her life. Left to her own devices, she simply did what she thought was cool, and what her friends were egging her on to do.

Rachael had a fear of being too ‘old’, or too Adult Contemporary. Unfortunately for her, that is where her immense talent was going to take her, and no amount of after-market engineering was going to change it. She had (has) the ability to be the next generation’s Celine Dion, even if that sounded corny to her. She instead has chosen to be another pretty good artist who will be forgotten in the very near future. I would look for Rachael to be working at Old Navy or Starbucks before too long. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that) But what an awful waste of a singular God-given talent.

I waited too long to buy this album
I just bought this album this weekend and immediatley loved the different sound as heard from the first track “All This Time.” I saw this album on store shelves when it first came out in 04 but never thought to buy it because I hadn’t heard any singles or tracks from this release. Unfortunately I waited too long to buy it and missed out on a great cd. Rachael was heavily involved with the production of her self titled album and I have to say I’m glad she was. My favorites are “All this Time”/”No Other One”/”You Never Know”/and “The Art.” The standout track for me is “You Never Know” because its beautiful musically and especially lyrically. Going through one of the lowest points in my life this song is perfect because it brings a humble feeling inside when sin tries to get the best of me. The sound reminds me a little bit of Radiohead’s “No Surprises” which I also like. I give this album 4 stars because Rachael is still young and has a great singing career ahead of her, so I’ll save that fifth star for when she releases an even better album because I believe her best is yet to come. This is definitely worth the buy, hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Nicely Done
She’s one of my favorite Christian singers and what a voice she has! More polished and refined than her earlier efforts it’s got a handful of standout tracks that are just awesome.

Rachael Lampa’s Finest Hour
Rachael Lampa’s freshman album, LIVE FOR YOU, was a nice, if a bit too safe, debut. 2002’s KALEIDOSCOPE was a huge step backwards for her as an artist and one of the few major miscues in Brown Bannister’s career as a producer (he shared production credit with Brent Bourgeois). KALEIDOSCOPE buried almost everything that was uniquely Rachael under layers of bland, soulless over-production and the end result was a pop album that was too bubblegum for adults but also completely out of touch with where the teen pop scene was at the time. In the span of just two albums, Lampa had reached a critical crossroads in her career. Would she fade away with the remains of the late 90’s teen pop scene or would she be able to revitalize her sound and come up with a project that showed she could still be relevant to today’s pop music scene?

The correct answer was the second choice. From the opening crack of the drum you can immediately tell that this is not the Rachael Lampa of 2002. That point is re-enforced by the album’s opening line: “It’s taken me all this time to see…” The sweeping theme of RACHAEL LAMPA is change and growth and so it is fitting, then, that it is a self-titled project. Tommy Sims (Eric Clapton, Michael McDonald, Amy Grant, CeCe Winans) has taken over the role of producer and his influence brings a wealth of street cred to the project that Rachael has never had before. Sims also collaborates in the role of songwriter and, for the first time, Lampa has contributed in that role on every song on the album, giving even more validity to the idea that we are, for the first time, finally seeing the music of Rachael.

“All This Time” opens the project. The afore mentioned drums, along with some heavy guitar and bass, set a musical atmosphere that is edgier and more live sounding than what we last heard on KALEIDOSCOPE. It’s a welcome change that brings a more authentic feel to the song, meshing well with one of her strongest-ever lyrics. It’s a lyric that Philip Yancey would love, sweeping away all of the “stuff” of Christianity until “all that’s left of me is You.”

“Rubber House” breaks out the funk for the first time - the bonus part of having Sims as your producer is that you also get to take advantage of his top-notch skills on the bass. He lets it all hang out here, and not for the last time, either. The song, which admittedly has an unusual title, is a message of reconciliation, and T-Bone makes a guest rap appearance to emphasize the point on the bridge. The album’s first ballad, “No Other One,” is also step forward for Rachael, since it refuses to fall back into the stereotypical CCM ballad sound. It’s not as strong of a song as “Blessed,” lyrically, but it still sounds good.

“When I Fall” opens with an enchanting bass line, somewhat reminiscent of Kelly Clarkson’s “Beautiful Disaster,” and reaches epic proportions by the chorus. Continuing the trend, it’s a winner from the lyrical standpoint as well. Contrary to the usual sunny message of a Christian pop song, “When I Fall” actually pre-supposes failure and hardship in life; that’s the kind of honesty that we need to hear more of. It ends with no break, immediately leading into one of the album’s biggest surprises, “Being Alive.” Apparently Rachael has been listening to old-school No Doubt a lot lately, because “Being Alive” is a full-force ska tribute to Gwen Stefani’s band, circa-TRAGIC KINGDOM. It turns out to be a good choice, though, as she shines vocally, showing stylistic range and flexibility that she’s never even hinted at before.

“You Never Know” is a tour-de-force, both lyrically and musically. Again, Lampa shows transparency and deft songwriting touch that is both honest with its emotion as well as grounded firmly in good theology and faith. The song is set perfectly to a melancholy pop/alt arrangement, reminiscent of Collective Soul’s “Run.”

Setting aside the introspection for a moment, “Good Life” breaks out the good times. Teaming with Robert Randolph (there’s another brilliant decision for you), it’s almost a no-brainer when you combine his talent on the steel guitar, Sims’ bass riffs, and Lampa’s vocals.

“The Art” is probably the most vulnerable moment of Rachael’s career. It is the only song on the album written completely by Rachael, and she taught herself the piano so she could finish writing it. Full of questions and struggle, like taking a handful of pages out of her journal, she sings “I know there’s an art to starting over again / and I know that God will never waste the pain / you can only try so hard to right a wrong / this song will only last so long / but life is just the art of living on.” Truly beautiful.

When Christina Aguilera released STRIPPED she made her mark on the pop music world, moving away from being just a teen pop princess to a musical artist, in the truest sense of the term. I daresay that Rachael Lampa has done the same thing on this eponymous release. She chose to take chances and calculated risks, and it paid off in spades. Lyrically, it is everything that a Christian album should be - firmly grounded in truth and a Biblical worldview but not afraid to deal with the human condition in an honest way. RACHAEL LAMPA is bold, confident, and mature - and one of the best Christian pop albums of the decade.