Ken Tamplin

"Stand Up and Shout" is a 69-song, career-spanning box set from Ken Tamplin, a four-time Dove Award winner renowned for his vocal talents, often compared to Lou Gramm, Paul Rodgers, David Coverdale, and his cousin, Sammy Hagar. This new Girder Records release is monster with 69 songs total on a comprehensive 4 CD collection features 22 unreleased tracks never before on CD as well and 6 new exclusive re-sung/re-imagined versions such as the song Borderline, Radio Bikini, Big Bang, In the Brave Days of Old and two more. Additionally, the box set includes a massive 12-page, 3,700-word essay detailing Tamplin's musical history along with an array of memorabilia photos.

Although he’d been previously known for his work with Joshua and Shout in the late 80s, I was a little late in discovering Ken Tamplin, first hearing a track by him on a record company CD sampler in the early part of 1994. After hearing that track (‘Dancing on a Volcano’, from the ‘Tamplin’ LP), I knew I had to hear more of his stuff. Later that same year, a friend lent me a copy of this Magdallan album.He originally lent it to me thinking I’d like it, since he thought the first track was a bit prog-metal influenced. He hadn’t remembered Ken Tamplin was the band’s vocalist!

Shout was a Christian glam metal band formed in 1987 by Ken Tamplin. Musically the band was similar to Stryper, but the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music cites them as being "more competent than Stryper". Lyrically, their songs were generally more straightforward than other Christian metal bands such as Bloodgood. The band garnered a Dove Award after their breakup in 1989. Their 1st album, It Won't Be Long, was recorded by session musicians. These included Lanny Cordola (Magdalen), Marty Friedman (Megadeth), Michael Angelo (Nitro), Joseph Galletta, Loren Robinson, Dennis Holt (AD), and others. The album was an instant hit, and the band played at London's famed Marquee in August 1988. Their 2nd album, In Your Face, sold 40,000 copies within a month of its release. The album was said to express "every nuance and shade of loudness and fastness".

While Rex Carroll (Whitecross) is often the first name mentioned when discussing the best Christian metal guitarists to come out of the eighties, a legitimate case can be made that Canadian born Dennis Cameron deserves equal consideration.