I'm All In

Album Review

Having reached the age of 18 before the release of his third album, I'm All In, Christian singer Robert Pierre is maturing fast, for better or worse. Pierre's music, written and produced by Matt Bronleewe and Jason Ingram (the singer usually gets co-writing credit, too), is Top 40 teen pop, the tracks boasting synth-dance arrangements over which Pierre sings earnestly in a voice filtered through processing and corrected by Auto-Tune. The effect is a bit milder than, say, the music of Katy Perry, but roughly similar. Of course, the lyrical message is different. The album actually breaks down into two halves. In the first five songs, Pierre contents himself by addressing his Savior, whom he lavishes with praise as, for instance, "Maker of the Stars" (a song credited solely to the singer as songwriter). As of the sixth song, "Stranger in This Land," things take a more embattled tone. At the outset, Pierre had declared, "There is a fire that burns inside of me," and he begins to describe that passion in terms of a conflict between his beliefs and the sinful world he sees around him. "I will sing for joy, the joy of the Lord, in the middle of it all," goes the chorus of "Sing for Joy," and "the middle of it all" is a place of sin and sinners where things are falling apart and only the singer's faith keeps him safe. He is most specific about the implications of that faith in "Silent Cry," which turns out to be an anti-abortion power ballad with a bridge that goes, "Life is a gift/Not a choice that you get/No mistake ever made/Made a life to erase." Pierre is, thus, not afraid to take sides, his side being on the more fundamentalist/evangelical end of Christianity, which may only be to say that he means it when he declares he's "all in."