Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Mary Mary's new one is Probably Worth It, I think.


Mary Mary make state-of-the-art inspirational R&B, and they have mixed feelings about losers. Here's the PopMatters review of Something Big. First two paragraphs:

“Sitting With Me”, a lovely lilting number from Mary Mary’s sixth album Something Big, portrays the R&B duo as total Christian schooldorks. Mean kids call them “holy roller”, “Jesus freak”, and “geek”; they’re picked last for the team; they’re basically Taylor Swift in the “You Belong to Me” video. Like plenty of schooldorks, Mary Mary console themselves by remembering that Jesus was also unpopular—the last week of his life, anyway—and drive the point home by singing powerfully, “I’ll sit on the sidelines as long as he’s sitting with me!” Christian rocker Steve Taylor once memorably sang “Jesus is for losers”, and Mary Mary would surely agree.

But in the album’s best stomper “Something Bigger”, they hilariously sing, “Nobody plans to be a loser!” “Something Bigger”, like the rest of the album, is all about doing “great things ‘cause of God in me”. Mary Mary are determined to survive; they’ll never raise their white flag; when they see the haters standing around, they get ready for war. The album even opens with a quasi-military call-and-response cadence. Erica and Tina, the two beautiful and non-dorky sisters who make up Mary Mary, clearly have no desire to hang around in Loserville.

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