Needtobreathe - The Reckoning Review

The Christian rock band looks to break out with their latest album. Releasing one of the best albums of the year will probably do a lot to help their case. No, I'm not kidding.

Needtobreathe - The Reckoning (2011) – 9.3 / 10.0
Label: Atlantic Records


I’ll just disclose the fact that I am a Christian who attends church on Sundays. This is kind of important because the first bit of information I found on Needtobreathe was that they are a Christian rock band. I don’t like to think that this taints my opinion, as I’m the last guy to listen to any sort of Christian music (in fact, I wrote a negative review of a Lecrae album earlier this year), but if you’re allergic to this sort of thing, I’m not about to tell you that your perspective is wrong or force The Reckoning on you. You will, however, miss out on one of the strongest albums of the year.

Needtobreathe play to the Christian rock crowd (so much so that they opened for Taylor Swift this year), but you wouldn’t know it by listening to their music. There are no references to God, Jesus, or worship beyond talk of saved, and even then, it sounds like it could easily double as a metaphor for something else. To put it plainly, the band is a rock band first and foremost, and a great one at that.

I’d discuss highlights first, but it might actually take less time to talk about tracks that aren’t up to snuff, so I’ll start there. “A Place Only You Can Go” layers on a little too much schmaltz for my taste and hurts the flow of the album. “Able” is one big slow-jam country cliché (and not one of those ones that saves itself by being a tearjerker, either). Yep, that about does it for the weak tracks. “Oohs And Aahs” is the kind of explosive track that demands to be played all over the place, “White Fences” is probably the best country-pop song I’ve heard in the past couple of years, “Drive All Night” sounds like the best song that Keane never wrote, “Slumber” is the kind of song that Bruce Springsteen tried and failed to write for his Devils & Dust album, and the title track sounds bigger than all of these tracks. And that’s just the first half of the album! Discussing further highlights would just be listing off every track on the album, so I’ll just say that the closer, “Learn To Love”, is the rare kind of love song that channels affection rather than suggests it and leave it at that.

More than anything, The Reckoning is proof that good music doesn’t have to be over-sexed, full of “adult language”, or rely on other such gimmicks to be effective—great songwriting will win out any day. I went into this album thinking that I would need to consult my personal dictionary of underhanded compliments, and now I can’t stop raving about the album. In fact, the score above is my attempt at restraining myself. It’s that good.