Lovewar - Soak Your Brain

  • Release Date Late December/Early Jan
  • Limited Run Vinyl.
  • 150 Purple Transparent, 100 Black
  • First Time on Vinyl
  • Remastered CD
  • The CD comes with a Limited Edition Silver-Foil trading card
  • Soak Your Brain ranked 47/100 in the Heaven's Metal Top 100 Christian Rock Albums of All Time
  • Produced by John and Dino Elefante
  • Originally released in 1993
  • 2-Sided Printed Inner Sleeves with Lyrics, and Photos
  • Ships in a bufferzone mailer

Lovewar - Soak Your Brain

Look out, this might become your favorite guilty pleasure album.

Tim Bushong, Greg Purlee and Rick Armstrong released Lovewar in 1993 on Pakaderm records.

It just might possibly be the world's most
underrated Christian rock album.

HM Magazine ranked this album at #47 on t he greatest Christian albums of all time. That should tell you something.

Yet, Lovewar was short-lived as Tim Bushong went on to form The Channel Surfers. Somehow John and Dino Elefante (Producers) saw something.  After all, their entire existence as producers and record label execs proved success as they had their finger of the pulse of what fans wanted.  From Petra, Guardian, The Brave and many others they found the IT factors and Lovewar was no exception.

Now on vinyl for the first time ever, as well as remastered CD. Vinyl comes in a purple translucent with 2-sided full-color printed sleeve with lyrics, write-up and more. The CD comes in a 8-panel jewel case with a limited edition silver foil trading card. Yep, those are making a comeback too!

Lovewar, back in the day was labeled as the Christian answer to Pearl Jam or Nirvana, as grunge was dominating music in the early 90's when this album dropped.  Thing is...Lovewar sounds NOTHING like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, or any of those grunge bands.  Not even remotely!  
Lovewar is a three piece melodic hard rock band very much in the vein of Extreme, with hints of Mr. Big, King's X, Galactic Cowboys, and eventual label-mates, Guardian, thrown into the mix.  Tight vocal harmonies, big, guitar hooks, intricate bass rhythms, and strong song crafting are the key elements of this band, with catchy melodies sticking in your head for days and insightful lyrics requiring a degree of thought. 
The truth is actually that this is Prog Metal and Guardian-like with big hooks and serious guitar chops. It's clean. It's fun. It's Prog Metal at it's finest with a great mix of metal, funk, jazz, grove and fusion with lots of starts, stops and time changes but with a little bit more flash and pop that on a King's X album. The guitars are crunchy and precise, the bass is dominant and THICK and almost worth the price of admission if not for the talent of the rest of the band. The drums are a great mix of jazz and funk, and the lead vocals and harmonies are very catchy. Overall the songs are very well put together tight and infectious.

Tim Bushong claims to have been influenced by popular writers like Francis Schaeffer and CS Lewis. No wonder lyrically, soak your brain displays more interest in apologetics (the defense of the doctrine) than do most records. 

Let's face it, there weren't a lot of bands doing the hard rock/funk fusion that Extreme, and to an extent Kings X and Galactic Cowboys did...and the excellent musicianship of these three men, Lovewar's Soak Your Brain is an album that you can turn on 20 years later and won't come across as dated because it is unique enough that it was never overdone or overplayed, so it sounds fresh every it's spun.  Lovewar was every bit as talented as their counterparts, both musically and vocally.  I think the Christian label may have hurt them as far as marketing goes, but even then, there is no chapter-and-verse Biblical quoting going on here, just strong, positive, uplifting lyrics about human relationships and social ideas.  You'll be proud to have this in your collection.

  1. Soak Your Brain
  2. Golden Rule
  3. Take Me
  4. Welling Up
  5. Space and Time
  6. You Win
  7. Keep Your Hands Off My Stuff
  8. In The Sea
  9. Just The Same
  10. You Are Not Alone

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