The title of Seán McMahon's latest album, Hymns and Homilies, might conjure a few specific images or expectations. Perhaps the "hymns" might refer to Keith Getty-styled modern worship songs or fresh takes on favorites from your pew hymnal. Perhaps "homilies" refers to sermon clips or didactic lyrics. Whatever you're imagining this album sounds like, I can almost guarantee that you'll be wrong, in part because this album includes such a surprisingly wide array of styles. I could imagine there will be listeners who might strongly dislike, say, the first two of these nine tracks, only to really love tracks three and five. Hymns and Homilies is a genre-jumping adventure that I've found to be increasingly charming and thrilling with each listen, even if it might prove rare to find a listener who loves every song.
The opener is the brief "Bang Bang," which, at only a minute and a half, functions more like an album opener than a proper standalone. Yet, as a tone-setter for what's to come, the lyrics come from a surprisingly cynical and sarcastic perspective, with lines like, "Let me stoke the flames of division with some carelessly assembled information." Lyrically, this is not at all what I'd expect from a hymn or from a homily, and that's without mentioning the music, which features trap hi-hats and gunshot sound effects atop McMahon's earthy vocals and folksy guitars. This blending of folk and hip-hop elements continues into "Whether We're Awake or Asleep," which goes even further into the genre mash-ups, with hyper-edited guitars and vocals that recall EDM and glitch pop. It's not as jarring here as on "Bang Bang" -- in fact, I find the chorus hook of this song to be quite infectious -- but it nonetheless makes me think of the backlash that some rock bands have received upon releasing songs that sound like this (such as when Fall Out Boy released "Young and Menace").
The album takes a sudden turn away from this decidedly non-folk experimentation on the following "Year of the Jubilee," which I expect to be a common fan favorite (especially listeners who are used to McMahon's more lush and traditional output). It still contains electronic drums and synths, yes, but they blend in beautifully beneath layers of acoustic and classical guitars, McMahon's reverb-drenched vocals, and gorgeous, Spanish-flavored trumpet arrangements, courtesy of Andrew McGovern. McGovern marks a notable return later on "Sweet Jesus," a track that's notable for its punchy piano stabs which invoke Elton John, and at this point, some listeners (myself included) might wish that McGovern had been invited to play on every song. His tasteful playing really elevates each song he's on, and additional appearances might have added extra layers of warmth and consistency to the proceedings. That said, I don't praise McGovern to the disparagement of McMahon, who also shows a gleeful imagination with how he arranges his songs. For example, the sonic switch-up into the chorus of "Sweet Jesus" is one of my favorite moments on the album.
Not all of McMahon's genre-bending experiments work, though. "You" leans back into the hip-hop influences of the opening two tracks, except this time, McMahon raps more than he sings. I hear influences in his verses, such as Coolio and A Tribe Called Quest, but I can't help but find his flows unconvincing, further hampered by this track's vocal mixing sounding oddly cheaper than the other songs. Meanwhile, "Baby Belt It Out" contains some of my favorite instrumental work throughout the album, with acoustic plucking, shakers, glitchy drum editing, and lovely synths that congeal together perfectly. The song would've been an easy highlight if it weren't for McMahon's vocals here sounding abnormally sloppy and low-effort, as if he was in a rush to get this song finished on time. I don't mean to project onto the man -- he clearly has a strong work ethic, having released one or more albums nearly every single year since 2011 -- but it certainly sounds like his projects would benefit from him slowing down and making sure he's getting the strongest vocal takes or guitar takes on each song. For instance, "Stranger Strangers" stands out as the most electric guitar-led song here, but the timing, mixing, and tuning of the electric guitars often sounds a bit off; the song then leads into a lengthy guitar solo, which features really cool licks that are offset by rougher moments that deserved another go.
Seán McMahon clearly had a strong artistic vision for Hymns and Homilies, but the songs often sound like they would never be found on a playlist together, let alone on the same album. Compelling ingredients can be found here, if McMahon chooses to continue experimenting in this hybrid of americana and electronic hip-hop, but as it stands, there are only a few songs where everything comes together convincingly, as on "Revival" and "Case Closed." The end results feel loosely connected and inconsistent in production quality, but it's a strong set of songs that deserved more time in the oven. It might also be worth pointing out that the album's lyrics, which often lean into the poetic and metaphorical, contain multiple theological references that make me think there are probably some major doctrinal issues on which McMahon and I would disagree. I'm not here to be a gatekeeper for his theological nuances, but I mean only to say that you should listen with discernment -- as we should be doing with all the media and art that we consume and engage with. So listen with discernment, yes, but listen also with grace, for you might find (as I did) that these songs warm up to you with each returning listen, perhaps even more than you'd expect.
- Review date: 3/25/26, written by Chase Tremaine of Jesusfreakhideout.com
Record Label: None
Seán McMahon: Thanks for listening! Ever since I've been more into electronic music and hip hop production, I've basically been chasing Beck - that fusion of acoustic folk songwriting and off-kilter electronic sounds. Mellow Gold and Odelay are still milestones for me. Ever since he released Sea Change, I see him as a serious songwriter who still knows how to have fun, raps, and makes no big deal about genre-bending. He's serious and irreverent all at once. Sort of like John Prine, but Beck extends this to aesthetic and production. I love his eclecticism, and the way his albums could be so erratic from song to song. In the same vein, the Beatles' Revolver and White Album are ideal albums - filled with incongruity, no uniformity in genre or even production style. I love that. And as far as I know, there aren't any Christian artists approaching things like this. Maybe I'm just not aware of them if there are. I don't think many artists do this nowadays in general; things are so "vibe"-oriented, meant to be glommed together into a vibe soup for passive background listening. My albums would be jarring as a background listening experience, but they're meant for immersion and musical conversation. I want it to be a tea ceremony, not a hurried buffet.
Seán: Oh yea, most of the songs have a scripture attached in the liner notes. There is always some esoteric message I'm chasing, usually obliquely. I'm very intrigued by Jesus as a teacher of parables and riddles - it's remarkable that more preachers don't follow him down this route. The glory of the gospel came from mystery; he really made you do all the exegetical work. He rarely laid anything out easy -- because divine mysteries can't really be laid out that way. St. Ephrem the Syrian is a big inspiration to me, his homilies were all hymns - glorious, mysterious, enigmatic poetry that he'd sing to his congregations. While I was writing and recording Hymns & Homilies, I was juggling a few authors: Margaret Barker, David Bentley Hart, St. Maximus the Confessor, Hans ur von Balthasar, Vladimir Lossky, Michael Martin, Sergius Bulgakov. Pretty mystical theology. Charles Coulombe was another one - his books "Puritan's Empire" and "The Compleat Monarchist" are musings on the Catholic underbelly of American history and the underestimated advantages of medieval monarchy and chivalry (respectively), and the song "Sweet Jesus" is basically a goofy LARP inspired by them: what if the Louisiana Purchase never happened, and the Catholic Spanish and French culture spread through the rest of the country? We'd have had rosary-wearing cowboy-knights, sort of like Cain (the wandering cowboy Shaolin Monk) from "Kung Fu," but Catholic, from New Orleans to Los Angeles, and people partying Mardi Gras-style at Holy Feast potlucks & parades nearly every week the way they used to in the Middle Ages. Tell me that last part doesn't sound fun.
Seán: Thank you! The Jubilee was a big deal to the prophets. Dr. John Bergsma's book, "Jesus and the Jubilee," goes deep into this whole thing. It's a rich topic of study, and turns out to be the heart of the Gospel: basically, true sabbath rest. Letting the fields lay fallow, trusting God for provision. When Jesus began his ministry in the Nazareth synagogue, he read from Isaiah's prophecy of the ultimate Jubilee ("The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…") and he proclaimed it fulfilled in himself. That was a big deal. The Christian life is the Jubilee life, that's my take. Take no thought for tomorrow, don't worry about life - rejoice with thanksgiving, even for persecutions and trouble. Jesus' burden is easy and his yoke is light. Rest in our Father's love and trust Him. That's the Jubilee. The song was actually inspired by Pope Francis' proclamation that 2025 would be a Jubilee year, hence the line about "Francesco said so at the Holy See" - I was tickled by that. We should be proclaiming the Jubilee every year, every morning even.
Seán: Oh yes. "Bang Bang" is just replacing the image of the Holy Spirit as a sword with a gun - how the mouth has so much power to speak life if we're willing. But the bullet is first chambered in the mind and heart, and we got to start there. It's about spiritual warfare, a vernacular summary of what the Bible says about how to deal with the devil. "Whether We're Awake or Asleep" is explicitly a musical sermon on 1 Thess. 5:10. I've done a lot of work in general on 1 Thess. 4-5, since a lot of my online following is interested in eschatology and that is perceived to be a very eschatological passage (the "Rapture" passage). There's a whole 8-part study of it in the "Theology" section of my YouTube page. But the song really condenses it, and might even get the point across even better. "You" is my Christian take on self-discovery, a topic a lot of local seekers are concerned about, coming out of yoga and New Age spiritual culture. "Revival" is a sermon about…revival! "Baby Belt it Out" is more like pastoral guidance for how to pick yourself up when you fall. "Case Closed" is a sermon about forgiveness. These are all topics I've dealt with from the pulpit over the years.
Seán: Those are my two gals, yes indeed. I'm a full-time local musician, which means I'm home a lot during the day. And we homeschool. I can never escape the kiddos! So they're a big part of everything. They help me set up and plug things in at gigs; they listen to my demos with me on car-rides and give me honest feedback; they even pitch ideas. As they get older, they have a better grasp of melody and rhythm, so it's very natural that they end up on record. My wife is also a musician, so we look at the whole thing like it's our family trade, and we're going about this as sort of an organic apprenticeship for the kids. I live on Martha's Vineyard, which is a rural island - since it's so cut off from the mainland, we have a lot of family farms and businesses, and in the same way, a lot of musical families stick together, multi-generational family bands. My drummer, Ted, who is practically my cousin, has kids, too; we look forward to passing the torch down to the next generation. Apprenticeship starts early!
Seán: My life as a recording artist is fairly separate from my life as a gigging musician. I've given up on trying to balance or make sense of all the different iterations of what I do! Most locals know me as sort of a wild jamband-leader and a guitar shredder, but there's not too much shredding on my records - even though I love shredding live, I don't like listening to shreddy records, so I don't make them. Brothers McMahon was mostly a country cover band, although I wrote some tunes for us and we recorded a bit. My wife Katie is usually in demand for jazz and symphony stuff, so her original rock music lives on records more than on stage, especially now while she's on a bit of "maternity leave". We've never recorded our jazz ballads! I've written orchestra arrangements for her symphony work, which I'm very proud of, but the unions didn't allow the concerts to be recorded. Oh well! The songs on "Hymns and Homilies" were mostly written to be studio songs, but I do perform "Stranger Strangers" with my band, and "Year of the Jubilee" works its way into my solo sets and the occasional interlude at church. I look at time in my studio as its own thing - I go in with my core song idea, but playing with arrangements and productions is more than half the fun. If I write a song that just lives on an acoustic guitar, chances are I'm going to play it live and I might never record it in the studio, as absurd as that sounds - I have a hunch that some songs just work best where they were written to live, and as the years go by, I've also realized that scarcity is cool. I remember in the 90's, how exciting it was to find bootlegs of those Radiohead or Smashing Pumpkins songs that were only ever played live, never recorded. I cherish that kind of stuff. The only people who truly know my music inside out are people who come to the Vineyard and hear me in person. It's impossible otherwise. I think there's something special about that.
Seán: The fact that you knew about the Sisters McMahon singing on the record is because you read the Bandcamp liner notes - I love that about Bandcamp! Not an option on Spotify. I have a tenuous relationship with Spotify and streaming in general. A lot of my catalogue is missing from Spotify because I pulled it all off a few years ago, and only re-uploaded some at the request of some superfans. I'm not unlikely to pull it all down again, to be honest! I'm a child of the 90's - I listened to tapes, CD's, and iPods organized by album. That's just how I like to listen to and curate my own music. I noticed years ago that social Spotify listening sessions get dominated by "jukebox fever" where you don't even get through one song before you jump to the next one. This is a very real thing with my kids -- it gets crazy. We got our eldest a Yoto and she listens to Abba and Queen albums now. No more jukebox fever. She just relaxes into the music and dances around, sometimes for hours, learning it all by heart. That's the sort of listening experience I want people to have with my music. I guess that's why I'm more into Bandcamp - not just because people can set a price on Bandcamp and support me, which is impossible with Spotify's rates. I just want people to hit play and let it ride - enjoy a deep dive into an album. But that's me. I'm not into playlists, and I never made mixtapes even back in the day. The closest you'll get to playlists from me is when I'm playing with my band, but we never use a setlist - I just fly by the Spirit, originals, covers, medleys, mashups. No night is ever the same. But people come, engage, and dance with us for the long haul.
Seán: Oh, there's a lot of music buried on the Workman Song Bandcamp page, and some hidden albums for subscribers as well. I share an unreleased song every Friday for my substack subscribers. I have two hard drives full of demos, I think my Dad looked through it all once a few years ago and counted somewhere around a thousand. It's all over the place. I'm pretty mercurial about style and genre. My first foray into electronic music was this Workman Song sub-persona called "Ion Zelig" back in 2012 or so. It was primitive, very lofi, very outsider. Right now I'm working on another Christian album, something of a Hymns & Homilies Part II but with more straight-up worship music. Some of it is influenced by hip hop both production-wise and lyrically - at least, in my mind, chanting a lot of lyrics fast counts as some form of hip hop. I also have some hard rock stuff - in the Smashing Pumpkins vibe - that I want to record with my band here on the Vineyard. I can't remember the last time I was in the studio with a band. But electronic music has become a part of my "creative lifestyle" so you'll probably hear more of it from me.
Seán: When my second and third kids came along, I somehow got turned onto the world of iOS music-making. The convenience of that creative flow is massive for a Dad like me. Koala Sampler with headphones has become my lifeline to creative activity while I'm nap-trapped and can't just pull out my guitar and sing in the house for fear of waking the littles. The guitar sample chops on "Whether We're Awake or Asleep" came about because I had the song idea while my kids were being crazy, so I could only get them quiet for long enough to sample each chord quickly, not even the whole progression. The progression you hear, I had to loop obsessively in my noggin so I wouldn't forget it until I had a second to put on headphones and sequence it! The other cool thing that Koala brought into my workflow was the ease of instant field recording with my phone, and that's how my kids end up being more a part of my process - I can sample their singing, even at the playground, and manipulate it a bit. Sample a bang on the slide and the clang on the monkey bars and I can make a beat on the spot. They love Koala too, it's part of our homeschool "music program."
Seán: Thank you for taking the time to delve into my little labor of love here. As you can tell, there are a lot of spokes on the wheel of my ministry of music and the Word - but one way people can connect to the "hub", if they can't come and visit Martha's Vineyard, is by following my Substack - that's where I share all my new music as I'm writing it, and I also share my Bible studies and sermons with free subscribers every week. Because it's e-mail, it lets us stay in very direct communication and really build community. I would encourage anybody to reach out to me if they are moved by my music, have a testimony to share, or want to commission works, whether musical or theological writings, etc. I love a good prompt. Any artists who want to collaborate, don't be shy! Lastly, I want to share the scripture that once saved me when I was really lost in life, and I had no idea what God's will for me was: 1 Thess. 5:16-18. This is for anyone who feels that way now: "Rejoice at all times. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in every circumstance, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." Amen!
 Alex Henry Foster Releases Special Collectors Vinyl as Part of Record Store DayThu, 09 Apr 2026 02:56:00 EST |
| The Hyssongs Sign with Horizon Records Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:00:00 EST |
| Reach Records and 2819 Worship Announce New Partnership Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:50:00 EST |
| FORREST FRANK and Noah Hayden Rename Dawn Patrol Project as PARTY WAVE Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:35:00 EST |
| 4Him's Marty Maghee Releases New Single "Screen Time" April 10 Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:20:00 EST |
| North Chapel Records Launches with Debut Artist Nathan Woodard's "I Believe" Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:25:00 EST |
| Leanette Lopez Releases "We Have Hope" to Christian Radio Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:09:00 EST |
Click here All News Headlines | 
RSS
Not all of McMahon's genre-bending experiments work, though. "You" leans back into the hip-hop influences of the opening two tracks, except this time, McMahon raps more than he sings. I hear influences in his verses, such as Coolio and A Tribe Called Quest, but I can't help but find his flows unconvincing, further hampered by this track's vocal mixing sounding oddly cheaper than the other songs. Meanwhile, "Baby Belt It Out" contains some of my favorite instrumental work throughout the album, with acoustic plucking, shakers, glitchy drum editing, and lovely synths that congeal together perfectly. The song would've been an easy highlight if it weren't for McMahon's vocals here sounding abnormally sloppy and low-effort, as if he was in a rush to get this song finished on time. I don't mean to project onto the man -- he clearly has a strong work ethic, having released one or more albums nearly every single year since 2011 -- but it certainly sounds like his projects would benefit from him slowing down and making sure he's getting the strongest vocal takes or guitar takes on each song. For instance, "Stranger Strangers" stands out as the most electric guitar-led song here, but the timing, mixing, and tuning of the electric guitars often sounds a bit off; the song then leads into a lengthy guitar solo, which features really cool licks that are offset by rougher moments that deserved another go.
FORREST FRANK x PARTY WAVE DAWN PATROL [Riverhouse]
