Album Review: Doctrine of Love by Jalen Ngonda
Ngonda’s second album sings love from the losing side, a man pleading with a train conductor, another staying through cruelty.
Revivalists tend to chase the pleasures of soul, the courtship, the slow dance, the warm glow of being desired. Jalen Ngonda—who taught himself to sing it as a boy in suburbia D.C., on his dad’s records, before taking it to a bedsit in London—instead keeps trying to salvage its wreckage. Come Around and Love Me, his 2023 debut, was more or less an earnest young man wanting to get inside. The new songs make that young man endure another terrible week. He pleads, he laments, he hovers in the wrong place, at the wrong side of a closing door. Ngonda keeps putting himself in the position of being the one who screwed up.
He spends “Mr. Train Conductor” pacing at a station, begging the man at the engine for a ticket home, back to a woman he has wronged: “Can you get me to my baby’s arms again?” And the admission is delivered so flatly: “I foolishly made her cry,” he sings, before word gets to him that another has “knows just what to do” better than he. Leaving cost him something that he can only name by its absence. He states it plainly: “I feel less human than before.” It’s this same passive surrender that fuels “I Can’t Ever Leave You”: a woman “won my heart just like a game of cards” and she maintains control. He sang “You treat me like a dog does a shoe” and says “I’ve had enough” but still can’t break free. “In your eyes I see a summer sky,” he says, but “in your heart I feel the blade of a cold, cold winter’s night.” He sees the winter there and stays through it.
Doctrine of Love strips away the pleas. He instead turns into a lecturer on the title song. He hands a diploma to someone who has completed the difficult lesson of love and reads out the findings with a straight face: “You had to pay the price, make the sacrifice,” and “You’ve had the ecstasy with the misery.” Brass section and choir harmonies brace up a hook like a circus call to duty: “Step right up!” chase each broken promise until it all spills into a carnival. “And all I can say is congratulations,” he says, with fake cheer, to a person who’s suffered enough hardship to have earned this degree. He’s only really outside of the pain and looking at it—with a smile—on this track.
Ngonda is at his most bland when the love is healthy. “Good Good Love” is nothing but thankfulness, a man so smitten that he will “travel far, dear, bring you the stars dear,” which floats by unmemorable. “Hang It On the Shelf” offers to take him his own pains to put away for her “I’ll hang it all on the shelf,” it takes his trouble with sweet innocent earnest and gives almost nothing in return. Even “Anyone In Love,” a second-person maximum about how “hearts break in two,” and that “walks in the park” “don’t mean a thing anymore,” could have come from any soul singer in the past sixty years, it is pretty, solid, without weight.
The lover of “Taken Out of the Picture” understands too late; he’s been taken out of the picture and can now see the room in which he lived. The metaphor is simple, profound: a man, left out of the frame, is sifting through photographs, like evidence of an unrequited affair. He sees past the photograph and past the mirror, toward the self-deception:
“I can see right through the looking glass
That every day and night that pass
You thought about another.”
“You hid behind your masquerade,” and all the while I was persuaded, I was your only lover. His last words are a simple, hurt query to an empty room. “Can’t you see I’m hurt?”
There are ten years behind “Hannah, What’s the Matter?” and, by his own account, nothing has gone wrong in any of them. He has got his proofs: “a long white Cadillac to take us near or far,” “roses and lilacs that shone by evening stars,” and a “sweetener that make me feel so nice at home.” He has got the goods, yet something’s slipped away from him, and he keeps asking the same question: “Hannah, what’s the matter... Tell me where did I go wrong.” Ngonda gave this man every piece of proof of a good life and put him down in the middle of it, holding a Cadillac and flowers, incapable of finding the hurt.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Mr. Train Conductor,” “I Can’t Ever Leave You,” “Taken Out of the Picture”