So, you decide to throw on Redemption, the latest Long Player from Karey Lee. You breeze through what, perhaps the first three tracks or so and, for all intents and purposes, you could—but you don’t—stop right there.

But it’s at this point, after just a song or two, that the artist’s whole angle becomes apparent.

Lee is a performer, in the truest sense of the word. Almost everything about this album, including the titles of the cuts (“Vibin’ With Me”, “Love Me Back”, etc.), the way he hits the mic, the very song structures and their arrangements, are all but calculated to go over big with a live audience.

To that end, Lee succeeds wildly, early, and very often. “Vibin” is the leadoff track and he ropes you in with the opening notes of this mid-tempo, just a beat or two per minute above a ballad, ode to, you guessed it, feeling this dude on the mic. Sure enough, this is a rocked out, raging, electric guitar number. But Lee endows it with a sense of the personal, predominantly with the way he sings.

Warbling would not be an entirely inaccurate descriptor for his style. His runs are unique, and his tenor is high-pitched and extremely expressive. It certainly conveys plenty of ardor on “Love Me Back”, which moves at a swift, crisp tempo led, wondrously so, by an acoustic rhythm guitar that the rest of the track was obviously built around. The energy becomes tangible during the chorus—which is characteristic of the album as a whole. There’s big, pulsating hooks rife with electric guitar madness and it becomes pretty darn difficult to deny the man the love he’s all but pleading for.

Speaking of pleading, “Please God” makes no bones about being an unabashed gospel song in which Lee bares his most vulnerable, humblest self to the deity. This time the tune is a ballad, attended by sizable chords of movie-esque acoustic and electric guitars, the latter swaying seemingly in place, yawning lazily above the other instruments.

The song serves as Lee’s testimonial to his earnestness to become a better man which, via extrapolation, is a sentiment that readily applies to the rest of the album, too.