Jesus Is King Review

The choir is the best thing here by a distance. Those arrangements are gorgeous, and when the record simply lets them sing it is wonderful, often enough to make the album worth returning to. Then a verse starts. The writing is the thinnest of his career, a chain of slogans about chicken restaurants and closed Sundays and tax law, and the conversion at the centre of it never becomes a subject, only an announcement. Songs stop after ninety seconds without having gone anywhere.

Follow God has a good soul loop and one idea, and the one idea is enough. Use This Gospel earns its saxophone solo. There is a version of this album, made slowly, in which a man who spent fifteen years writing about wanting things finally writes about giving them up, and it would have been fascinating. What arrived instead is twenty seven minutes, uneven and unfinished, with real beauty in the sound and very little in the words. Devotion is not a substitute for material, but it carries more of this than it has any right to.