Published September 1st, 2006 by hrabbach
Brian Littrell - Welcome Home
First, an open admission: when I first listened to Brian Littrell’s solo debut “Welcome Home”, I was very disappointed. I was expecting something else than what I got and that’s mainly CCM Magazine’s fault - their review of the album wrote of Brian Littrell as something like “the legitimate successor to Michael W. Smith and Steven Curtis Chapman”… so I was expecting music similar to that of these artists. Well, it is not. And I’m also not sure if Littrell is as gifted a songwriter as those two. But after putting the CD to the bottom of my stack of new CDs and waiting a few weeks, I decided to have another go and forget about what my expectations were when I first bought it.
And it gets a lot better if you don’t compare it to something it doesn’t compare well to. The second time, I actually started to like the album a lot. Littrell’s voice is very nice indeed (if some girl had ever forced you to watch a Backstreet Boys a-capella session on MTV in the late 90s, you would have already known that), although at times he can’t seem to resist the temptation to overdo it a little and comes across as showing off… but he has the voice for it, so I guess he can be forgiven. And if I had any doubts how explicitly christian the lyrics of his songs would be, well I must say he’s doing pretty well on that, too.
Unfortunately, but that’s of course my personal feeling, the best songs are the ones that he didn’t write himself - and that’s also why he’s not another MWS or SCC. My personal favorite is the wonderfully weird “Angels and Heroes” with its rhythmically interesting harmonies - “Wish” is a close runner-up with lyrics that I’m relatively sure I’ll use for an article for the “Think About…” category some day. Where the album clearly fails, in my opinion, is when Littrell tries to incorporate gospel elements into the songs. What some artists have turned into an art form feels a bit silly and awkward on this one. Overall, it’s a bit of a mixed bag - some excellent songs and some that I usually skip. Maybe it’s best to listen before you buy, so you can figure out if this one’s for you.
