In the (admittedly unlikely) scenario that an alien landed on earth and demanded to be brought up to speed on contemporary American choral repertoire, he could do a lot worse than spend an hour with the Santa Fe Desert Chorale’s ‘The Road Home’. Joshua Habermann’s excellent ensemble are style chameleons, gamely tacking everything here from traditional Shaker hymns to smoochy gospel arrangements, astringent contemporary classical motets to anthemic, contempo-spirituals, and performing them all with full-wattage brilliance and brio.

While some American groups favour a European delivery, this is choral singing that’s unapologetically American. Vowels are bright and broad, tone fuzzy-warm and delivery coloured by the little swoops and guttural kicks of gospel. Habermann has pulled off that trickiest of balancing acts and created a choir of soloists also capable of seamless ensemble blend.

If the former is evident in the many attractive Shaker arrangements, it’s the latter that carries the affirmative homophony of ‘Angel Band’ from Shawn Kirchner’s Three American Songs and Stephen Paulus’s contemporary choral classic The Road Home, gilding their folksy-familiar harmonies with a soft-focus glow. There’s neat contrapuntal dexterity in the third (and most successful) of Kirchner’s arrangements, ‘Hallelujah’, and Sydney Guillaume’s lovely Dominus vobiscum, its stylistic debt to the current Baltic rather than American tradition.

But, while the Chorale’s delivery is absolutely consistent, that’s not as true of the music itself. Jake Runestad’s Reflections, commissioned by the choir, is an anonymous affair, Phil Mattson’s arrangement of ‘I’ll be seeing you’ obliterates the song’s sepia sentimentality in the glare of his too-earnest reworking, and the obligatory Lauridsen – three movements from his Mid-Winter Songs – are hardly vintage.

This musical road may eventually lead us home, but takes some unnecessary detours along the way.