Blessed Menorah Achieves Fine Emotive Articulation on “Yahweh Take Over”

Gospel music shares an intrinsic relationship with performing on the stage. Since it’s a community-inspired style, leading a congregation in praise and worship is one of those core activities behind the growth of every gospel musician. It’s certainly the case for Blessing Unekuojo Oguche, otherwise known by her stage name Blessed Menorah.

With long years of singing experience, her evolution into composing her own original music has led to several illuminating moments on-stage, where personal artistry fuses into divine inspiration and it becomes a seamless transition between where one ends and where the other begins.

At the Glasgow-held Sound of Revival Concert, there was the moment when Blessed Menorah came up to perform her song “Yahweh Take Over”. As the title infers she seemed to have turned whatever reception she would get to the hands of the Lord, but that belief was also backed by an astute sense of musicianship. For indeed the performance drew from the soulful vocalizing that’s a central feature of the genre’s enduring classics.

Evoking serene bliss, Blessed Menorah’s effort combined a rare emotional acuity with precise enunciation. “We are desperate for revival in this place / we are hungry for your glory to be revealed,” she sings in the opening lines of the song, establishing the sort of tense motions that precedes an opening to God’s will. The human has turned and turned everywhere, and finding no peace around, ultimately looks up towards the promises of God.

That sense of a beleaguered past existence remains a striking note in gospel songwriting; and Blessed Menorah, leading a church far away from her home nation of Nigeria, invites us to witness the shared manifestations of the human condition. One certainly feels the strain of being in the way she stretches out the titular phrase: “Yah-weh, yah-weh…take over!”

Halfway into the song, the drums emerge over the piano, turning the plea for God’s presence into a glorious acknowledgment that the desired thing is already within reach. Triumphantly the song transforms, and from the reactions could show that the artist indeed touched a part of the crowd in a way that was special, singular.

She’s a proper gospel talent, one with an innate sense of pacing, that most underrated skillset in the best performers. I look forward to her future work.