U talkin’ dc Talk to me?

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John S. Quinn-Puerta: Would I have immediately looked up the chord charts for this for the youth band if I was still in high school? Probably! Its midrange melodies and simple, repetitive lyrics have all the hallmarks of a youth group hit. But there’s something very tacky about the way the song tries to merge a men’s gospel choir with pop rock. 
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Oliver Maier: *Throwing darts at several very specific dartboards* What if there was a song that sounded like if (thunk) Algiers performed (thunk) “Feel It Still” mashed up with (thunk) “Bad Guy.” And what if a (thunk) (thunk) Christian hip-hop artist sang it . And what if it was (thunk) “not as bad as that sounds like it should be but still not very good.” Okay, yeah.
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Ian Mathers: It’s not every day a guy who looks like a retired MMA fighter makes a generically (but what genre? honestly, without referring to the religious content here, I don’t know what I’d call it) stirring track that somehow manages to invoke both “Jesus’s Blood Never Failed Me Yet” with the pathos inverted and the way Sufjan’s “Seven Swans” described the omnipotence of the Christian God as terrifying — just not, in either case, sonically. Actually I’m not that familiar with CCM, maybe that is every day. 
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Alfred Soto: Thanks to a gulped sincerity not unknown to, say, a TV on the Radio fan and impressive momentum, “Help is on the Way” manages to evoke flights of angels singing to TobyMac’s rest. If one of the points of hymns is to universalize a personal despair, then “Help” succeeds. 
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Thomas Inskeep: After a truly horrific 2020 which included the death of his oldest son, TobyMac decided to start off 2021 with an upbeat song of hope, and boy am I glad he did. This isn’t just a series of anodyne “I love Jesus” sentiments like so much of CCM these days, but real, brass tacks, “He’s here for us” explication; its key lyric is “So I’m holdin’ on to the promise, y’all/That He’s rollin’ up His sleeves again.” TobyMac clearly (and, I’d say, rightly) feels that God’s here to do the work needed to help His people, and that’s the kind of messaging that grabs me and doesn’t let go. And not only is “Help is on the Way” genuine inspiration on a lyrical level, its musical accompaniment helps it to take off. The bridge here is all gospel tent revival vibes, particularly with the strong backing vocals of his band, DiverseCity (not just on the bridge, in fact, but throughout — theirs are the first voices we hear on the record). And the chorus goes straight up, cribbing from peak-era U2. I mean, TobyMac’s musical history goes back to the birth of CCM legends dc Talk in 1987; the guy knows a thing or two. He hasn’t used that musical knowledge to such great effect in a long time, though. Good Lord, this is sensational. 
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Mark Sinker: The way it leans into its driving thump, playing its whispers off against its muscular declarations, reminds me of a gospel-dusted Einstürzende Neubauten. If that’s a surprise claim I’m going instead to argue — of course without filling in any of the necessary background scaffolding — that it should surprise no one. 
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John Pinto: Decent, but the definitive statement on faith in the 21st century has already been made. (Cedric the Entertainer as Rev. Joel Jeffers in First Reformed, “JIHADISM… is EVERYWHERE.”)
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Andrew Karpan: I like the way that TobyMac’s voice jumps comfortably between the relative peaks of Bono and J.T., marshaling its energy and message both insistently and in occasional gestures of steam-cooked soul. The production bowdlerizes this, but somehow that makes its impact more effective. That message — a rejection of despair that feels, nonetheless, impossible to express outside of the hokey self-consciousness of Christian rock — comes through a little too clean to be believed.
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