Whether or not you like the typical American choral sound, there’s no denying that it was made both by and for the music of America’s contemporary composers. You can hear Randall Thompson, Lauridsen, Whitacre in its soft-focus blend and thicker textures, and it’s a rare British choir that doesn’t feel just a bit too thin, too precise, too correct delivering it.

Which makes this latest release from the Choir of Merton College, Oxford – a collection of modern American choral works – an interesting one. Music director Benjamin Nicholas has been canny in his choices, steering away from the lusher end of the repertoire towards the leaner, more Anglican sound world of Nico Muhly and David Lang’s angular minimalism.

Merton’s relationship with Delphian extends back nearly a decade, and you can hear the changes under Nicholas’s careful direction – in the softer-edged blend, the more bass-anchored sound. Both of which come in handy here, fostering the glow that suffuses Muhly’s Senex puerum portabat as well as the rapturous close of Muhly’s A Song of Ephrem the Syrian (‘A wonder set apart yet received by our lips’) and the all-important coda of Lang’s Psalm 101 paraphrase if I sing, with its belated consolation and blessing.

There are a lot of arpeggios here, and the collection (which includes a generous handful of premieres) is at its best when it varies the pace. Abbie Betinis’s Cedit, hyems shouts its difference in ear-catching textures and motifs; a haunting solo flute and icy chatter warm gradually into a pulsing dance, as winter gives way to spring. Muhly’s enticingly titled organ toccata Rev’d Mustard His Installation Prelude adds some playfulness, while his setting of Ben Johnson’s A Hymn on the Nativity takes us away from ostinato and into more rhetorical, responsive word-setting.

Only in the encore-like final track, the modern classic that is Stephen Paulus’s The Road Home, do we miss the full-fat tones of a Conspirare or similar. Suddenly Merton’s bright, youthful sopranos, so agile elsewhere, lack the control and heft for this uncompromising, affirmative simplicity.