Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

I'll be real up front with y'all here and state at the outset that this is not my type of music. The title MIRACLES and the subtitle, A JOURNEY OF HOPE AND HEALING pretty much says it all. In the Hartlaub lexicon of plain-speaking, "healing" = "quit whining and get over it, you pussy." That poster that said "If you love something, set it free; if it doesn't come back, hunt it down and kill it" hung in my bedroom for years (and yes, I got laid more when I had it up). If life smacks you in the face, get up, smack it back, and go do something else. So Paul Cardall and I are not really reading out of the same playbook, or are even on the same playing field. But here's the thing: if you're into that mindset that reaches for words like "healing" and "closure" and you live for that half-hour every week where you sit in a room with someone who says, "And how are you feeling about that?", Cardall's music is the place to go.

The music will put you in the mind of the Chariots of Fire soundtrack (doo do do do doo, doo do do do do, do doo...) though Cardall varies things quite nicely by varying the accompanying ensembles on each track Piano is prominently featured on each track, with occasional violin, cello, and choir sparingly augmenting the proceedings. I call this "heaven" music, in that when I was a kid, and had this concept of heaven as a place where people sat around on clouds all day, and drifted, MIRACLES would have been the soundtrack. And I wouldn't ordinarily recommend it, but there's extenuating circumstances here. When that piece of crap Tim McVeigh murdered all of those innocents in Oklahoma City, his crime didn't stop with the event of those deaths. What he did will be felt for generations, through the survivors of the victims. Those survivors turned to Cardall's music for comfort and chose his music to be played during the dedication services for the memorial to their murdered dead. If that music brought comfort to one soul, if it turned one fatherless or motherless kid back around from despair, if it kept one grieving parent from closing all the windows and turning on the gas, then this man deserves our thanks, our gratitude, and our support.

So I don't care if you buy it and never play it, but pass up your next bottle of Scotch (it's Lent, anyway) and use the proceeds to buy MIRACLES. Cardall deserves our support. And who would you invite over first to play music for your kids, Paul Cardall or Rob Zombie? Gotcha.