US Church Drummer Totally Slays On Aussie Hillsong Cover

23 September 2014 | 9:43 am | Staff Writer

Where is your God now?

Australia-born megachurch Hillsong has long prided itself on conveying an accessible, relevant, "hip" image to the world, and it seems the message is not lost on one US church drummer, who has found himself an internet star after he let it all hang out during a cover of Hillsong United's 2013 chart-topping single Oceans.

It all starts off innocuously enough; a lady and her keyboard lay the groundwork for the slow and swaying song, all soaring vocals and shut eyes, when — at about the 0:25 point — her backing drummer crashes right in with his wild, borderline-solo-style thumping. It should be noted that, in the original song, the tempo definitely picks up for the percussion entry, but... not like this.

It's not even the drummer's wild sense of experimentalism and interest in mixing it up that makes this so bizarre — it's that, despite the flourishes and at least some evidence of past playing history, the drummer struggles with the most fundamentally important part of being a band's timekeeper: keeping time.
 

See? He's all over the shop. It's fun to watch, but that is nowhere even close to being a metronomically precise performance. It's enthusiastically, tragically epic. Jesus wept, even.

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Oceans was released as the lead single of Hillsong United's also-named 2013 EP, which sported the original track and four variant versions for good measure, and made it to the top of the US Billboard Christian Songs Chart before the new year. More recently, it appeared on the Billboard Top 100 in May, and former Disney queen Selena Gomez brought it back into the limelight briefly in August with a 15-second Instagram clip of her covering the song (well, all but eight minutes and 45 seconds of it, anyway).

You can have a listen to the original track below.