Michael W. Smith - 2

Summer of 2006 again...

Michael W. Smith – 2
Reunion Records 1984

In 1984 Van Halen, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, the Cars, Tina Turner, Run D.M.C., and Madonna were the kings and queens of rock as they all sold massive amounts of records and toured extensively. Overall, it was a pretty big year for music. People had money to burn in those days; happier times if you will. Okay, maybe the Reagan years weren’t exactly the happiest of times, but if Frankie Goes To Hollywood could move some units, it had to be a good year for artists, right? Not necessarily. If you don’t believe me, let’s have a look at this month’s atrocity.

When I found Michael W. Smith’s 2 in the bin at Goodwill it was resting soundly between a copy of The Sound Of Music and a Wanda Jackson album that I actually bought for myself. At first glance I was confused as Mr. Smith is actually climbing on a structure made to resemble the argyle pattern printed on his gray sweatshirt. Not an argyle sweater, mind you, but a gray sweatshirt with a black, pink, and white argyle pattern printed on it. I told you it was confusing. If circa 1984 Target had a cut-out bin full of sweatshirts then that would be my number one guess as to where he purchased such a dashing piece of cloth. Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you turn the record over he’s going to be modeling his argyle socks. Sure enough, upon flipside inspection, that’s exactly what he’s doing. The front of this album makes Roadmaster’s Sweet Music cover look like a Da Vinci painting. After I was able to pull my eyes away from the argyle mess and look at the face on the cover, I thought it was pretty cool that Joey from My Two Dads had put out an album.

Upon first spin, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to let this one continue to play. Okay, when a scientist clones an animal, the cloned animal is inferior in every way to the original. Usually, the cloned animal is more prone to disease and has considerably less cognitive ability. If the same scientist decided to clone the clones, you can surely imagine the biological fiasco that would soon follow. Now, let’s say that this same scientist just happened to have both Rick Springfield and Billy Joel in his or her lab and decided to do some cloning experiments. If he or she cloned Rick Springfield approximately seven times and Billy Joel five times, forced the lesser of each set of clones to somehow mate and carry a child (I would let Rick carry the child since he seems more caring), and then made him sing about God, you would have Michael W. Smith.

This is generic Christian rock (and I use that term loosely) at its finest. After hearing this earsore I would gladly listen to an album by Greg Evigan. Hell, I’d even take a Paul Reiser album as long as he wasn’t doing comedy. Not even the use of a vocoder could save this album. I actually think that Michael Smith purchased an array of cheap Casio keyboards (from the same bin in which he fished out his sweatershirt, no doubt), hit the demo button, and then just started singing about God over the pre-programmed Casio ditties. In the most blatant move of musically-related laziness that I have ever witnessed, he actually titled one of the album’s two instrumentals “Musical Instruments.” Talk about effort. He could have at least called it “Frankenjesus” or “Godrophenia.” Thankfully he didn’t use this approach for the entire album, otherwise there would be two songs named “Musical Instruments” and eight songs titled “Musical Instruments With Vocals.”

Michael W. Smith’s 2 is not an album that I would actually recommend to any sane individual. In fact, I’m not even sure Jesus would like this record and he loves everyone and everything, including Loverboy. I would, however, recommend this album to a sixth power Daryl Hall clone.