God rock soars on an appetite for devotion

The Hillsong Church band is topping the charts. John Elder reports on its heavenly success.

Date: 06/03/2011 Sunday Age

IF  ROCK’N’ROLL is the devil’s music, how did an album by Hillsong Church’s house band manage to get to the top of Australian iTunes charts?

The Hillsong album, Aftermath, temporarily left rivals Pink, Michael Buble, Rihanna and Bon Jovi licking their heathen wounds.

Aftermath also debuted at No. 4 in the ARIA chart, while in the US it startled local reviewers by debuting at No. 17. Last week the album fell to No. 8 in the ARIA charts, but remains the highest-ranked Australian entry.

The name of the band is Hillsong United, which makes it sound more like a football team than a collection of kick-ass hard  rockers.

Critics and music industry analysts say that a football team mentality, sticking with your tribe, lies behind the success of the band, which has been winning gold records since it first started making albums in 1998.

Nicole Fossati, editor-in-chief of industry pulse-taker The Music Network, believes Hillsong United has “a feverish following in that the congregation feels compelled to buy the album because they know it’s a way of donating money to the church. Pardon the pun, but it’s the Holy Grail of an impulse purchase”.

If this suggests Hillsong United gets no respect from the mainstream music world, Ms Fossati says it’s because “there is less of a fandom about the music, the band, their journey and growth. The entry into the music is primarily about being aligned to the church . . . You’re buying for  God“.

Christian  rock is a growing genre. Billboard runs Christian singles and album charts, and honours the top performers, in the same way indie  rock or country music are honoured.

But Hillsong United is different from most Christian acts, says Tim Kelly, general manager of marketing at Universal Music, because “they are integrated into the Hillsong Church. So they are essentially one and the same”.

As a point of difference, he cites a Universal act, US band Anberlin, which sports a Christian membership, but doesn’t work to a strictly Christian audience  and will comfortably tour with wild-living bands such as Iron Maiden.

“You can read their lyrics in the same way you can read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. You might not know there is a Christian sensibility at work,” he says.

Matt Coyte, editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, says Hillsong United’s success “isn’t telling us anything about the music charts, but is more a sign of a societal trend. It’s definitely powerful . . . if they were inclined to be political, maybe they’d have an outcome on policy”.

Hillsong has a number of musical groups targeted at different demographics. An indication of how Hillsong United is a subset of the bigger church picture can be found on YouTube. Hillsong United’s Lord of Lords has enjoyed 1.2 million hits. However, Mighty to Save, as performed by a softer-edged and more clean-cut band at a church performance, has had 10 million hits.

Hillsong’s publicist didn’t return our calls.

The sound of the band features cleanly produced driving  rock and anthems that owe something to U2, and melodic acoustic ballads that are more churchy. The lyrics have a faux-romantic aspect. When you hear “there is no one else for me”, the song could be about the girl next door rather than the man upstairs.