My wife and daughter got me doing the “post 10 albums that influenced your musical taste” thing on Facebook… but I’m much too guilty of pontificating to simply cut and paste the standard blurb. I’d rather share the story of why the song or album matters.

And so we come to the Christian Metal album:

My brother was the one who had all the arguments with my parents about what was acceptable and what was not, what boundaries he could push and which were unyielding, what amount of Christian in the Christian Rock was enough to make it not just Rock ‘n’ Roll from the pit of hell.

I feel like my parents did pretty well with the information they had available to them. Like a lot of churchgoers at that time, they accepted what their spiritual authorities and mentors had to say about different trends going on among the youth, and sometimes those spiritual leaders only had the information given to them by hearsay or by a form of the telephone game… hence some of the extreme misunderstandings like “the Satanic panic” era for Dungeons & Dragons. (I talk at length about the way D&D is viewed by Christians in another post.)

Side note: we managed to get some tabletop RPG time with games like BattleTech—nothing demonic about giant stompy robots covered in lasers and missiles!—and Middle-Earth Role Playing—essentially D&D but with a d100 system instead of d20, and all set in Tolkien’s world, which was barely tolerable as opposed to blatant witchcraft or occult imagery.

Back to the Christian bands…

Stryper had some kind of non-troversy for saying things like “To Hell with the Devil” (theologically accurate, but I suppose it’s coarse language), so they were out of the question. Petra was acceptable but they were pretty chill really… sort of a (much more overtly) Christian U2, I suppose… and we wanted something heavier.

Deliverance was one of several bands my brother introduced me to, and this tape got a lot of use. In addition to the screeching guitars and echoing vocals, they had some surprisingly meditative tracks – a version of Psalm 23, and the instrumental intro song for the album.

Barren Cross and One Bad Pig are the only others I can think of off the top of my head… and also a band called Vengeance that was basically growling indistinguishable from the rumbling overdrive of their guitars. I couldn’t quite get that one, other than for comedy value.

Vengeance was basically the Christian version of the band in whichever Ace Ventura movie it was where they use the growling for comedic effect. I think that was Cannibal Corpse.