At just shy of seventy-nine minutes, this album captures gospel singer Travis Greene live in Nashville. Let’s face it; I’m teed up to love this album. A live concert featuring a black gospel artist is right up my alley, but I found this album to be really, really lacking. It runs itself right up to the CD length boundary with fifteen songs (thirteen of them are live) and I think I’d probably say there are two or maybe three good songs here. This is the “shout-along” style of worship music that prioritizes loudness over melodies and it feels like most of the choruses here don’t have much in the way of melodies and eventually all the songs feel the same. The songs all have the same structure, the same beat and the same shouted choruses with almost nothing to distinguish one from another. The title track is an exception, a genuinely rousing and catchy ode to moving on from your past. Love Will Always Win is one of the two studio tracks that close the album and it’s a low-key acoustic number that works really well. It isn’t that the bulk of the music here is all that bad. There’s only one track here, Forever Amen, that is downright terrible; for future reference, do not attempt to shoehorn the Lord’s Prayer into a steel-drum heavy calypso beat. But even though a lot of the music here is just inoffensively soupy, the eighty minute running time is wearying and kind of punishing. The moment when you’re eight tracks into the album and realize that you’re just half-way through is quite discouraging. I come to black gospel for the spirit; Travis Greene has managed to make the most dispiriting black gospel ever. 1 ½ stars.
tl;dr – over-stuffed live album features a barrage of uncompelling songs that all sound the same; a couple of songs are good, but at near-eighty minutes, that isn’t enough. 1 ½ stars.