Strong debut album of a cappella gospel and trance inducing choral music from Kampala-based, DRC-hailing, Evangelical Church choir Kingdom Molongi for the peerless Nyege Nyege Tapes.

‘Kembo’ introduces the six voices of Kingdom Molongi - Nathalie, Jacque, Esther, Olivier, Samy, Alain and Angel - rendered in beatific clouds of choral harmony and extended melody by producer Jonathan Saldanha, who switches out the thunderous percussive thrust of his work as HHY to farther distill the sort of vocal energies found on his previous large-scale work for a 150-piece choir.

Kingdom Molongi find divine beauty and grippingly soulful rawness from the simplest elements, only occasionally gilding or buoying the choir with synths or drums, and mostly letting the group’s music speak for itself, in a mix of Lingala, Swahili, Kikongo, traces of French, and the trance-like quality of speaking in tongues. Trust, it’s distinctive stuff, naturally playing into and out of expectations with a rare profundity and pull that’s bound to see their music travel.

From the plaintive a cappella of ‘Boya Kotala’, set to brooding synths that come off like Mhysa via Enya, thru the subtle drum accompaniment of the processional ’Tokumisa Nzambe’, wickedly disrupted with raggo voices in the aether, and up to the elegiac majesty of ‘Mystic’, they take heart at every turn. A standout rendition of ‘Hosanna’ roots their work in tradition and frames it in bold new ways thru spacious production, then resembling aspects of chamber music on ‘Nzambe Bolingo’, and when they keen into head-messing discord on the album’s final moments, it snaps you out the trance and straight into the kind of surrealist headspace that recalls Klein’s ‘Marks of Worship’.