The question facing Jalen Ngonda on his second album was whether the charm of his debut was replicable or whether it had been a first-time conjuring, the kind of thing that only works once before the seams start to show. Doctrine of Love answers it in the first thirty seconds of “Anyone in Love,” when the strings arrive and the question dissolves entirely.
Ngonda is Washington D.C.-born, London-based, and reportedly uninterested in most music made after 1972. The Daptone connection — the Brooklyn label that has spent two decades treating soul music as a living practice rather than a heritage act — suits him perfectly. His producers Vince Chiarito and Michael Buckley, who also shaped the debut, understand that the best retro soul doesn’t announce its influences; it simply inhabits them until the distinction between homage and original thought becomes impossible to locate. That is what Doctrine of Love does across ten songs and just over thirty minutes.
The record moves through moods with the assurance of a set list honed over years of touring, which is more or less what it is. In between albums, Ngonda played Glastonbury, toured globally and guested on the new Gorillaz record — all of which has given him a confidence in front of a song that the debut, excellent as it was, only occasionally touched. “Burning Temptation” has a taut, coiled energy, drums pressing against the melody like something that wants to break loose. “Hannah, What’s the Matter?” is the kind of mid-tempo sweetness that ought to feel slight but doesn’t, because Ngonda’s falsetto locates a register somewhere between a question and an answer and stays there. The title track opens with church bells and walks straight into a minor-key groove — his vision of love as moral code, every thought and action measured against compassion first.
What keeps the record from feeling like an exercise is the songwriting. Ngonda and his collaborators apparently whittled the album down from more than twenty-five candidates, and the selection shows. Nothing drags, nothing reaches for an effect it can’t justify, nothing wastes its three minutes. The closer “Taken Out of the Picture” ends on a note of Diana Ross-tinged balladry that leaves you wanting the side to flip back round, which is the whole point.
There will be those who find Doctrine of Love too polished, too reverent, too comfortable in its pleasures. They are wrong, but they are free to be so. This is a beautiful record.
