The Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford, sing with tonal warmth, excellent tuning, impressive blend and without the clipped, prissy tendencies that can blight their adult counterparts over at Trinity College, Cambridge. But their very ‘human’ sound resonates differently in the college chapel (listen via the choir’s website) than in the less woody acoustics of Keble College Chapel and St Michael and All Angels, the Oxford churches in which this disc on the theme of Revelation was recorded.

For starters, verbal articulation is disappointingly muddy. It might be unfair to compare the Queen’s performance of Harris’s Bring us, O Lord God to the serene yet explosive recent recording from The Sixteen (Coro, 11/15). But you don’t have to be a full-time pro to articulate text, and in The Sixteen’s recording you can decipher every single word of it. Still, Rees’s choir sing Harris (and Bainton) with style and shape. They are probably at their best in Faire is the heaven, where cumulative phrasing and control conspire towards a shattering climax.

Beyond those miniature masterpieces, it’s the same old story of church music’s bizarre stylistic cul-de-sac. Gabriel Jackson, Rihards Dubra and Cecilia McDowell do little more than resort to a toolkit of passé gestures, gestures they appear to refuse to adequately transition to or from. The harmonic language in David Bednall’s The Seventh Angel is stuck in a textbook neo-Impressionistic ecclesiastical rut. Ditto Philip Cooke’s The World on Fire. At least Toby Young’s Seven Trumpets has some teeth, with a genuine response to text and a harmonic imagination that looks beyond faux blue notes. James MacMillan’s style might be well established but it feels astonishingly fresh next to much of the ‘contemporary’ music here, which is woefully short on revelations.