Review Summary: A rare concept album that manages to stay both easily accessible and extremely interesting. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is affectively retold for a modern audience.
This is an excellent concept album. It essentially follows the narrative of Pilgrim's Progress with dramatic monologue interludes moving the story along as the songs develop the characters and themes. Often, the problem with concept albums is that they are rather hard to follow, or are just simply too weird or abstract for the average listener to follow. However, Kareem Manuel's “Until Forever” manages to pull off being both an original and interesting concept album while remaining extremely accessible and easy to listen to.
The album starts with the main character, whom we easily deduce is Christian, living in the City of Destruction. Just as he does in the classic book by John Bunyan, he sees that the city is going to be judged and that he must leave. The rest of album chronicles his journey, relating it to modern America. It is a fascinating project, taking one of the best selling, most famous texts ever written and recreating it for a new age. Though it does not have the adventure, narrative aspects of the actual book, the album relates essentially the same message. The album tells the story by moving from theme to theme, basically imagining a man living in the modern Western world going through the same internal struggles and coming to the same realizations that Bunyan's Christian did. Using the medium of rap music works perfectly for this project, since it enables Kareem Manuel to get a lot said and keep it very engaging. It never feels cheesy or out of place. Rather, it feels completely relevant and can easily be related to the plight of Christians living today. The music is high quality and very well executed. The lyrics are thought provoking and poignant, making for an overall superb listening experience.
Thematically, the album centralizes around the ideas of sin, judgment, grace, and forgiveness. The grand conclusion of the album, “Hero” is a truly memorable song. Using the chorus to the song with the same title by Abandon, Kareem Manuel brings in Christian rap superstar Lecrae into the mix to make a powerful, epic song. After all the wading through sin and brokenness throughout the album, Hero ties all the hopelessness and wrestling together, claiming that Jesus is the “hero” that offers a way out of this world of pain and sin in which we are currently residents. In the end, though it is a very serious and even somewhat dark album to plow through, the ending is hopeful and triumphant. It is a thoroughly rewarding listen and very much a prime example of great Christian art, avoiding all the great pitfalls of modern Christian music. It addresses real issues in an honest, relevant way, using music that is accessible and top-notch quality. Kareem Manuel deserves much credit for this impressive accomplishment, which has unfortunately managed to remain mostly unnoticed by the music community.
