Title: “Sacrifice”
Category: EP – 6 tracks, runtime – 29 min
Genre: Contemporary Christian Music
Release Date: 23.August.2024
Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ – 8/10
Ravishing. Both the sum & the parts. A swelling piano, sacred yearnings, and suave vocal work are a pleasant constant across the half-hour project.
Grace & Fresera, the leads on the opener, “Lead Me On”, offer up some mean pipes from the onset, somehow both serene & hungry. Lyrically hinged on a lovestruck devotional arc, the track bears allusions from Psalm 23, reimagined into a Christocentric framework. All the while, it’s impressive how the wording gels with the arrangement on the piece; two lone vocals against grand keys & a strummy acoustic guitar, leading into a delightful harmonic chorus, onto a choir-driven climactic refrain buoyed up by strings, only to quiet back to a tranquility akin to the start of the piece.
“Back to You”, the followup, has Grace holding it down on her own. And it’s more topical and personal. Unlike its predecessor, it’s less descriptive of the singer’s object of devotion, and more about her journey to Him. She affirms her resolve to abide by Him, but she’s quick to follow it up with a plea to be aided in seeing it through. This number has the most poppy production of the entire bunch. There’s a number of remarkable elements transpiring at the same time, from stunning vocal sprinklings & distorted echoes to some sparse niftily placed beats. It’s sure bound to delight fans of mainstream low-tempo synthpop.
Onto the main chunk, the middle bulk of the project is so well curated that it feels like a transitional tunnel. From the atmospherically acoustic Psalm 139-coded “U Know Me” helmed by aptly raw delivery from Joel Bunjo & his dreamy-voiced mate Jehu Carter, to the longingly soulful “Nkumanye” whose choral phase is one of the fullest moments of the EP, and onto the croony ballad “Desperate”, the triad puts to sound everything that works about the project. Romance-coded at points but still on theme, the current alongside the sacred, it’s quite the natural journey to the closer.
To crown the effort, the group opted for the lyrically affirmational “You’re Loved”. It’s a mostly decent end for what it is. I mean, yeah the melodic progression is generic, and it’s tempting to regard it as one of those common platitudinous pieces of the self-help variety, at first, rather than a devotional number. But it’s rescued by the innocent beauty of that “ooh-whoo” main refrain & that cheat code of an organ underneath it.
In any case, despite shortcomings as the glaring kind on the closing track, this entire project is quite commendable, especially given the artistic limitations inherent within a genre like CCM. BunjoVille Ug show remarkable promise on here, the sort that’s bound to see them break the mold of their niche soon if they carry on with being this adventurous.
