So Many Dynamos: An Adult Bible Study Series on CD

Spider-Man searches the city looking for dynamos, because he knows that Doctor Doom needed a large energy source to send out his threatening message over the TV airwaves (The Amazing Spider-Man #5, 1962). It takes a little while for Spider-Man to web-surf over the city to find Doom’s hideout, because there are So Many Dynamos.

Spider-Man finds Doctor Doom not the band, So Many Dynamos. The fight between Spider-Man and Doctor Doom could use So Many Dynamos as a soundtrack. They play an energetic, frantic dance rock with quirk hooks, bouncy vocals, and some good thrash thrown in for the gotcha punch. Imagine Devo (keyboard punk) teaming up with Radio 4 (dance rock beat) who then tap Go! Team (vocal cheers) to lead the chants before the whole thing falls into the banging of an Everclear thrash.

Now the real fun: I could use every song on So Many Dynamos’ Flashlight as the basis of a Bible study or sermon.

Track 1: “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning” – We hope to live until Sunday morning when we’re forgiven for how we live during the rest of the week. Wryly, the song includes the hopeless line, “We will get what we deserve.” It’s a cry for mercy, even as it denies that God will show us mercy—holding back the judgment we deserve.

Track 2: “Search Party” – Try this one for a lesson about Noah’s Ark from the perspective of the people outside of the ark who say, “There will be no search party for us.” Fortunately for all of us, even if the crimes in the song are ours, God sent a rainbow saying He’ll never destroy the Earth with a flood again and that He will search to save us all from the flood of eternal death.

Track 3: “Progress” – While appearing to begin with an evolutionary chant, “Single cell, single celled organisms orchestrate/And synthesize and mutate,” the song seems more about the evolution, as it were, of God’s creatures into sinful beings. There’s the Tower of Babel like references (“We’ll build skyscrapers together”) which leads to a repeated refrain of the album’s first track, “We will get what we deserve.”

Track 4: “Home is Where the Box Wine Is” – Excellent song for exploring the consequences of breaking the commandment, “Do not commit adultery,” as the song shows the vacuous nature of a sex-with-no-commitment relationship (“We called it making love, but we knew it wasn’t that.” Here’s the album’s first mention of the decency theme: “Do you have a sense of decency, or do you want to go home with me?”

Track 5: “How High the Moon” – An apparent apocalyptic vision of the world falling apart into chaos and darkness where there are warnings to grab flashlights in a power failure, but when there’s also bullets, hurricanes, shards of glass, and an exploding moon. Like the Old Testament prophets who told the people that judgment was coming because they didn’t turn to God, the song says, “We don’t speak with our folded hands/We don’t listen, we don’t understand.”

Track 6: “In Every Direction” – Picking up on the fearful line in “How High the Moon” which says, “Don’t go out tonight,” the apocalyptic, after the war scenes continue, but in the desolation, “In every direction, they’re coming for us now.” It’s a scene out of Revelation where the Church is hemmed in on every side by the warring forces of Satan, “Everywhere you look, there’s voices getting louder. . .Sirens are gone, silence is on in every direction.”

Track 7: “Inventing Gears” – We’re back to the theme of progress which means we’ve evolved into people who have outwitted themselves with their sins, avoid the blame, and got good at “faking interest.” With “Inventing Gears,” the jig is up; “I can’t be surprised this is happening to me.” It’s a song halfway towards a biblical repentance, as if representing just one stanza of a confessional psalm. As in “Home is Where the Box Wine Is,” the loss of decency figures prominently in this fall into sin: “Where is your sense of decency, dear?”

Track 8: “This is Why we Can’t Have Nice Things” – A twist on the repeated phrase, “We get what we deserve,” this song acts like a proof about why we’re not deserving of nice things. Spilled wine, lack of romance, clothes on the lawn, all go back to that theme of the quick pleasures. Quoting Frampton, “The radio sings, ‘I want you to show me the way,’” perhaps it’s a hint that such a sexual come-on really leads nowhere towards “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

Track 9: “We Vibrate, We Do” – At first blush, this song could be a highly crude topic. Instead, the song actual mainly talks in terms of the vibrations caused by our voices—vibrations of speakers generated by electric impulses through stereophonic devices. It’s our voices that cause mountains to disappear. See how this may apply to any number of biblical texts about the power of our words to destroy—and through the Holy Spirit, to rebuild.

Track 10: “In Our Sleep” – Nihilism greets the listener now in this song cycle which has brought us to the grave. “This isn’t what we had expected: no trumpets, no cymbals, just the deadest silence.” It’s a challenge to the biblical truth of eternal life (although perhaps an acute description of hell), but this song also voices the latent fear that there is nothing more, a fear that threatens to eat away our faith.

Track 11: “Let’s Move Mountains” – Jesus said, “If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you" (Matthew 17:20). This song comes back like an answer to the nihilism of “In Our Sleep” with the opening lyric, “Mountains will move, just say the words and believe it’s true.” However, that glimmer of faith is swept away with the sound. Even as Jesus described the power of faith to His disciples of whom He had just said that they had “little faith,” so Flashlights closes with a line that cries out for hope in the midst of our little faith: “Heavens no, hell no, there’s nowhere, we’re going nowhere.”

Follow the tracks, use the album, make it the basis of a good rockin’ Bible study, but you will have to import the Bible—downloading grace, ripping Gospel, burning salvation, and seeing how Jesus brings answers to these songs—our worst fears, doubts, cravings, and dead endings. So Many Dynamos makes these thoughts electric, and thereby, you can power a whole application section of any Bible study or sermon through this album.

Thanks to So Many Dynamos and Skrocki Records for the review CD.