“In these “strange” days, I often find myself wondering if those people who have faith (in some kind of higher being) have in any way managed to reach a better understanding than a poor materialist like myself of the situation which, despite our best efforts, we are all facing together, the godly and the impious, the bigots and the atheists, the agnostics and the god-fearing.I even more frequently find myself wondering (and I’ve been doing this more or less regularly since well before coronavirus suddenly exploded into our lives and everyday thoughts), whether it might be comforting to have a strong belief in something, to have a set of rules which shape and inform every moment of our days, setting the pace and giving our lives a specific purpose. Basically, when I’m feeling downhearted, I can’t help envying people who have the comfort of a faith (religious or otherwise) and I find myself hoping that maybe one day I’ll manage to see beyond my purely material and rational little world.I suspect that it’d probably take something more than this facile, petty feeling in order to achieve any form of spirituality. However, even though it seems more unlikely that I’ll achieve faith and spirituality than that I'll see a live concerto before the summer, I still manage to find solace in music because, at the end of the day, it is one of my few close ties to the immaterial world (another that occurs to me is my love for my family, albeit I’m rather afraid that with that one, although it’s something pure, there are more earthly implications).All of this means there could hardly be a better time to come across Songs of Yearning, the fourth album by the Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus, a Liverpool ensemble whose name makes direct reference to the terrorist group in Luis Buñuel’s film “That Obscure Object of Desire”. Their first album, The Gift of Tears, came out in 1987 and, over a period of 33 years, they have only released a total of three, the latest of which was 2015's Beauty Will Save The World, a work of austere and immense beauty.Their music - composed by an ever-changing collective of musicians revolving around the three fixed members Paul Boyce, Leslie Hampson and Jon Egan (the latter has left the project just as the new album is coming out) - includes ecstatic, dreamy sounds, mixing folk (which other people might call apocalyptic) and sacred music, ethereal voices and orthodox chants (sometimes sung in various languages), field recordings, samples from films and aggressive rhythms, delicate acoustic instrumentation and rarefied ambient sound passages.Songs of Yearning (accompanied by the wonderful limited edition collection, Nocturnes, made up of eleven tracks never before released on an album, including the latest single I carry The Sun, two minutes of luminous, dreamy pop) does not wander far from the band’s classic sound, although it does sound more immediate and, if possible, even more spiritual and mystical than usual. So it’s hardly surprising that the titles include the likes of “Ave Maria”, “Vespers”, “Miserere”, “O Nata Lux”, “Prayer” and “Kontaktion (for St Maria Skobtsova)” (the Kontaktion is a short hymn typical of the Orthodox Christian Church).And, although attempting to describe RAIJ’s music has always been a rather arduous matter, not so much because it’s complex or abstract, but due to its mystical aura and how far it is from most other contemporary music, all that can be said is that the compositions, accompanied by a huge amount of literary and cultural baggage, with references to Yeats, Dostoevsky, Tarkovsky and Buñuel, are for the most part acoustic, influenced in the same way as much by choirs of mysterious, and celestial voices (often sung in an Eastern European language) and the sound of the bells of the Orthodox Church (Avatars, Beginnings, Kontaktion), as by more ethereal and transcendent Western folk (the track, Songs of Yearning, or the sublime Celestine - listen to it and if you are moved I advise you to get a heart transplant immediately).Even so, I wouldn’t want you to make the mistake of thinking that Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus’ (they’ve dropped the initial “The”, which has fallen like a dry leaf carried away by the wind, over the years) music is difficult, obscure or pretentious.
Nothing could be further from the truth - while the band’s music might on first impressions seem impenetrable, actually it is always profoundly simple and accessible (the band members claim that they are not good enough musicians to create more complex compositions), familiar, luminous and appealing, exciting and intense, combining the sacred and the profane (and treating both with the same loving attention) and relying on more levels of meaning, which means that, each time you listen, their records open up more, offering themselves to us, giving us an opportunity to delve further into the discovery of our highest, more spiritual intimate lives.Listening to Songs of Yearning - and all of RAIJ’s work – each time I have two contradictory feelings - on the one hand I feel lost and shaken at the suggestion that there is something transcendent, on the other I have the intoxicating feeling that I have managed to make contact – albeit fleetingly – with something absolutely different, which my rational senses are not usually able to perceive.“
