Thousand Foot Krutch - 'Untraveled Roads' (Live) Album Review

Tracklist:

1.Running With Giants

2.Light Up The Sky

3. The River

4. Push

5. Untraveled Road

6. Let The Sparks Fly

7. Born This Way

8. Courtesy Call

9. Be Somebody

10. War Of Change

11. The End Is Where We Begin

12. A Different Kind Of Dynamite

I'm not usually one for jumping into things blindfolded, this album has recently become one of the reasons why.

What is this album and who are Thousand Foot Krutch? Well, for those who are unaware of them, Thousand Foot Krutch are a Canadian Christian Hard Rock band who've been around for 22 years. They sound like a lot of things I had heard of, occasionally another particularly Marmite Canadian band called Nickelback, but that's not all I heard here, nods to (and when I say nods to I mean painfully close imitations of) Linkin Park (The End is Where We Begin), Rage Against The Machine (A Different Kind of Dynamite especially the "Let the shots ring out" refrain harking back to the section of the song "Wake Up" where Zach De La Rocha repeats "I think I heard a shot") among others. Thousand Foot Krutch wear their Christianity on their sleeves, and all over their lyrics and on-stage banter (there is on-stage banter because Untravelled Roads is a live album), all of which made this non-christian listener incredibly uncomfortable (I would imagine almost how a priest might feel listening to Cannibal Corpse?).

Why am I picking faults? Because contrary to what my experience with this album shows, it is possible to be labelled a Christian Rock band and write music that doesn't sound like a carbon copy of a plethora of other bands, and not make any Non-Christian horribly uncomfortable while listening (King's X is the band I'm thinking of here).

Now this album is clearly not for me (I own the first Rage Against The Machine album anyway, I have no use for a Christian version of "Wake Up"). But from the sound of the audience on this recording it is for a lot of people, if you are one of those people, grab it, listen, enjoy it on all the levels I can't. This band and album left me cold, but the fact is they're good at what they do, it was live and there was clearly a large crowd digging it, that means they're doing something right, even if I don't get it, so a low mark with a caveat, if you're into what they're about, you'll probably like it a lot more than I did.