Album: Creed

Weathered, Wind-Up/Epic

If the Church of England is serious about getting its message across to "the young", it should ditch the Spanish guitars and tambourines and get with the programme like Creed, the Christian rock band, who, after the monstrous success of their second album, Human Clay, (20 million copies and rising), can justifiably call themselves America's biggest band. Their secret is deceptively simple: the first time I played Weathered, it sounded like routine US angst-rock – Pearl Jam without the grief; Marilyn Manson without the eyeliner and subversion. It wasn't until I read the lyrics that the penny dropped and I realised that the mullet-headed singer/ lyricist Scott Stapp was, in fact, the anti-Marilyn, fighting the tide of nihilism and fishing for souls among America's estranged adolescents. Creed are stealth Christians, sneaky apostles of angst – which, in its own way, is just as subversive as Marilyn, I suppose. And, to be fair, their hearts are in the right places: in songs such as "One Last Breath" and "Weathered", despair is countered with the hope of salvation, and Stoic endurance presented as heroic resistance; while "Stand Here with Me" pays tribute to the moral guidance of Stapp's God: "The truth of it is, there's a right way to live/ And you showed me." But there's a canny ambiguity to these modern hymns that allows them to be read simply as songs of fraternal fellowship, while Mark Tremonti's crunching grunge guitar riffs let Creed punch their weight comfortably alongside the likes of Bush, Korn and Bizkit.