When he first appeared on American Idol,
Chris Sligh seemed like the sixth season's answer to the unconventional appeal of
Taylor Hicks, a guy who didn't look like a pop singer at all but had enough off-kilter charm and sense of self to win over the American public. Things didn't quite work out that way, as the
Sligh train derailed halfway through the season, ironically enough because he had an inflated sense of self, mouthing back to the judges (especially Simon, as he's the only one anybody cares about) in a way that made him, not them, more arrogant. This helped usher him off the show, but not before he built a following among the audience he had hoped to target: contemporary Christian music fans, who the former Bob Jones University student cultivated through his diligently updated blog during his year of Idol fame. This nicely set up a chance for a career as a CCM recording artist, an opportunity he seized with his 2008 debut,
Running Back to You.
Sligh's American Idol exposure ensured him top-level CCM talent, coming in the form of producer Brown Bannister, who has worked with such Christian heavyweights as
Steven Curtis Chapman and
Amy Grant, and producer Stephen Leiweke, who helmed the debut from
Jars of Clay. With these two producers,
Sligh has run the gamut of CCM, appealing to both the middlebrow mainstream and an element of the alternative side (albeit an aging alternative, as the
Jars of Clay angle does not reflect the increasing
U2/
Coldplay mannerisms of many younger CCM bands). It's a record designed to appeal to everybody within its demographic and it does, without offending anyone, surging on layers of overdubbed guitars and strings and bucketloads of earnest emotion. There's nary a trace of the smack-talking
Sligh who set Simon's teeth on edge, and frankly, it could have used a bit of bite, as this does nothing more than fit into CCM conventions, occasionally pushing those boundaries just a little, as when "Loaded Gun" flirts with a chamber string arrangement borrowed from "Eleanor Rigby." It's enough to position
Chris Sligh as a viable CCM artist, which it does, and that's all it was meant to do. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine