Mike Banta is a fairly prominent figure in contemporary Christian music, a singer/songwriter and producer who has released several albums over the years.
No Words is
Banta's first all-instrumental album; although many of the 12 songs have titles descriptive of Scripture, others have more oblique titles like "Kaboom." Even that attempt at a full-on rocking tune reveals the album's fundamental flaw: these are excessively polite guitar instrumentals that are too melodic and conventionally structured to qualify as new agey bliss-outs but too ordinary to sound like anything other than the background music on The Weather Channel. Though
Banta is clearly quite technically adept, his fleet guitar solos are backed with snoozingly lame synths, drum machines, and '70s-style fretless bass, all of which give the record all the deep emotion and heartfelt honesty of a wait at the dentist's office.
No Words will likely be a disappointment to many of
Banta's fans, those whose primary attraction is to his devotional lyrics, and it seems unlikely that he's going to pick up many new ones with it. ~ Stewart Mason