Supernatural

You have to dig pretty deep on Supernatural to find dc Talk's Christian roots. Adopting an even more mainstream approach to making records, Jesus-pop's one-time favorite poster-boys are all over the Top 40 map on their fifth album. Listen, don't they sound a little alternative here? Is that a hip-hop beat there? And isn't that ballad pretty? Also tossing in some new age musical mysticism, classic-rock guitar crunches, and even jazzy interludes along with the usual contemporary pop conventions, dc Talk have just about every format covered here. Maybe if they stuck with just one genre, they could have perfected it rather than projecting the desperately airplay-hungry image that's all over Supernatural. "Big G" and "His Son" do make a few appearances here and there, but the references are so thin, the band could just as well be praising a girlfriend, or spouting cryptic X-Files-type messages for the paranoid, and possibly spiritually devoid, masses.