Rend Collective Experiment

     This spotlight group is sometimes classified as eclectic, special, soothing, calming, passionate, folkish and just unique. Rend Collective Experiment is a sound all to themselves unique. The band is from Northern Ireland but their anticipated Stateside debut, Organic Family Hymnal is being well received. Gareth Gilkerson shares on their artist agency’s website the following about their name, “Everything we do is growing in a natural, non-manufactured environment. Rend was a student movement representing numerous churches, and the ‘collective’ grew out of that. The songs came from an organic environment, searching after the heart of God. We wanted to reflect what God was doing and teaching us, and offer that up for the rest of the world to hear.”

(courtesy of googleimages)

     Organic Family Hymnal features the heart of the group put into music as Gilkerson described. David Crowder even lends a little collaboration on the song Faithful, but songs like You Bled or Come On will catch your attention just as easily. I’ve always loved that acoustically centered sound that you’d expect to hear walking through those small shops at some old quiet shoreline town or what a coffee house would invite to perform…and Rend Collective Experiment is exactly that. I find myself putting them on cool mornings when I got a cup of coffee in the early mornings or when I just want that quiet unwinding (something I do way too sparingly).

     The amazing thing about RCE is that they have so many people co-existing in the group…which adds so many layers to their music that listening to them is almost like working your way through the layers of a fancy dinner. There are actually about 15 of them in the collective and it truly just depends on the night for who is there, with only 4 being the ever present ones in the group. I found myself loving the songs where the lady in the group step forward and sing, or when they go unplugged with a guitar and use their voices and a variety of percussion instruments to invent amazing sounds.

(courtesy of googleimages)

      Put simply their unique style will slowly grow on you, they won’t get you hooked immediately but the more you listen to them the more you will want. Check them out when no other genre seems to fill the musical desires, as their sound is a niche few others fit into