Why does some music get old so fast?

2013 was the year of Rend Collective Experiment.

I'd known about them for a while before that through one of our children's school friends, who had sung with them occasionally. They had a fresh take in the worship music scene, getting away from the big worship-leading super heroes and megabux commercial worship bands, and were down to earth guys who really had a heart to worship God. The Big Church Day Out reinforced that, and they did a campfire worship time one night that was so very natural, in total contrast to the other acts we watched on a big stage.

I'd tried previously to introduce their stuff in the church, but (since we were using pre-recorded worship tracks to sing with) their music was so produced, so jarring in that form that it was pretty-much unusable.

I've re-listened to Homemade Worship For Handmade People again recently, and Monday night brought some of their songs to the worship team. They just don't work - for us.

And that's the clue really.

A lot of songs can be re-shaped to work for a particular team & congregation, or the CD arrangements are so bland/MOR pop-ish that they can be used verbatim, without change. I love the heart of worship in RCE, but their songs are THEIRS in a spiky, awkward and uncomfortable way for us. They could probably come to our church, lead worship in their style with their material & it would be great. As for us: no can do.

I'm thinking about trying to re-arrange one or two, but I'm not sure it's possible because their signature runs right through the middle, and it might destroy the song itself - and that's no good at all. Some songs have a song-within-a-song trying to escape. It was only when trying to teach the rhythm part of Brenton Brown's Your Love Is Amazing to someone new on Monday that I realised I'd spontaneously re-arranged that song (years ago) to bring out the song inside. Not at all sure that could be done with any from RCE though.