AS A NATION of recovering Catholics, there’s nothing we enjoy more than a good, gently blasphemous joke. Just look at Father Ted.
Which was why I was delighted when, while searching for Alive-O songs on YouTube (a very normal thing to do), I found an electropop cover of Here I Am Lord.
Clicking in to the account, Catholic Throwbacks, threw up a small selection of Mass hymns, each given a modern twist.
Christ Has Died sounds like something out of the X-Files:
While Through Him, With Him, In Him, got the death metal version no one ever knew it needed.
It’s all so intriguing. Who is behind these mysterious yet brilliant covers? Why do they do it? And they’re definitely Irish, right? They have to be.
I emailed the channel with my queries – and as it turns out, I was wrong. Catholic Throwbacks is run by a musician from New Jersey (he prefers to remain anonymous). He was raised in the Church and, like many Irish people, grew up singing hymns.
He stopped going to Mass at 14, but over the years he found the songs never left his head (yep, us too):
I would jokingly sing the songs that were burned into my psyche with fellow recovering Catholics… One day I just decided to record ‘Christ Has Died’. I used digital arpeggiators that made it sound kind of culty, so I found an equally culty picture of Jesus holding a rifle sitting on a rock and made the first video.
He arranges, performs, and mixes every song himself, occasionally asking his friends to contribute vocals or blood-curdling screams (as on Through Him, With Him, In Him).
He chooses the genre to fit the hymn – The Lord’s Supper is “super creepy and dark”, and got a suitably creepy and dark remix, while Hosanna in the Highest becomes a strangely great reggae tune.
I’m sure I’m not the first Catholic to have imagined ‘Hosanna in the Highest’ as Hosanna IS the highest, or relating the word ‘high’ in some way to getting stoned. [Reggae] seemed like a natural fit!
He told me his covers have angered a few Catholics (just look at any of the comments sections) but he gets a bit of a kick from it:
I’ve gotten some emails as well, some praising what I’m doing and some trying to save me from the depths of hell… A downvote means I’ve forced a Christian to confront the absurdity of their routine. What more could a troll ask for?
Catholic Throwbacks accept requests for covers, so if you have anything you think he should tackle, you can message him here. Keep up the important work.
