Written by: Dave Cantrell

Speaking to beauty, the innate and, by definition, exquisite spiritual nature of it, how it so often rises so far above and beyong the quotidian that it can, via the emotional core that shores up our instincts, make us cry, always proves something of a challenge. I mean, how does one articulate one’s response to a piece of work that, from the very off, virtually exhausts the stores of the articulable? The answer, I’ve found, or in any case as close to an answer as I can come, is surrender, and thus do I fall not so much under but into the spell that is The Dream We Carry, the latest album from Liverpool’s The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus.

Now, that may very well appear an overwrought intro to what is ostensibly ‘just’ a record review, but while that’s a valid reaction that this writer might most often share when encountering a nutgraf such as that, I respectfully ask that, in this case, you lay aside any reflexive cynicism – understandable and generally healthy as it might usually be – and just read, just listen, just absorb. This is important.

Fast approaching the fortieth anniversary of their debut full-length The Gift of Tears, released in 1987 on legend Geoff Davies‘ Probe Plus label, the RAIJ story is, like most everyone’s story, both intriguing and banal – the shorthand version goes like this: founded in 1986 by then-core group Dave Seddon, Joe Egan, Sue and Paul Boyce to which Leslie Hampson quickly attached himself and from which came that debut and, with a minor personnel variation, second record Mirror in ’91. Add to that a pair of EPs (La Liturgie Pour La Fin Du Temps in 1994, Paradis a year later) and then insert the legendary ‘long hiatus’ which is nominally interrupted in 2013 by a look-back collection called After the End that, title-wise, will prove slyly prophetic as a quick two years hence the – literally, for this listener – breathlessly astonishing (yes quite the superlative but immodestly true no less) beauty will save the world arrives followed a fleet five years later by not one but two full-lengths – Nocturnes and Songs of Yearning – that are promptly banged together into a double LP, a truly resurrectional stretch shepherded into being by the intrepid Nick Halliwell on his Occultation label and whether you got all that or not the fact is it’s both important and it’s not because beyond the who’s the whats and the countless wherefores stands the music, commanding attention to the core of your being which is commonly referred to as your heart and it’s from there one listens to not simply this latest record, but to any and all of the work of the band that made it because that’s where what they’ve created and – thank the fates – continue to create dwells, residing there from the very first needle drop. Press whatever button you need to press to hear their work then lay your heart on the stereo and – I say again – listen, absorb and, well, yes, ultimately swoon.

On this latest (and believe us, it could not be a more appropriately titled), we step off gently enough with the quietly moving elegance of the wordless “Song For Lost Souls” and, truly, there is simply no band or artist better suited to the task of addressing said souls and here without surprise they offer their solace with a tender, elegiac care, so understatedly moving it proved a challenge for us here at SEM to stop hitting ‘repeat’ and move on but move on we finally did, eager for the rewards forthcoming even as we knew that same challenge to resist that ‘repeat’ button would hover above us track after track. We weren’t wrong.

“Les Fils Des Etoiles,” sung in French with a mournful strength by (vocalist throughout until the last track) Jessie Main, though – obviously, perhaps – not the Satie composition, nonetheless evokes a fin de siecle fatalism that projects on to one’s imagination like an audio hologram. “Goodbye to Berlin,” past the brief, soundtrack-ready interlude “Among the Lost,” shifts a subtly beguiling gear into a kind of sinuous, offhand tropicalia that, for whatever odd reason, conjured in my imagination some lonely ice skating rink in the German capital during the Weimar years, there’s a mist and poignance hanging in the air that, against the odds, manages to bring sadness and joy into alliance, one that, by definition, should be brief yet RAIJ, as has long been their habit, manage to maintain throughout, whether it be the floating cinematic feel of “Remnants,” an instrumental with a languid force that speaks to that exact dynamic, the way “The Road Home” unveils itself with the sort of muted resplendence of a dawn that’s just now broken, Jessie’s German vocal against an aching backdrop of piano and cello defining the strength so often found in vulnerability while, thematically, as that same particular motif carries over to the next-up “Tales of Nowhere” (desolate but oh so beautifully so), is something of a throughline not just here on TDWC but over the entire span of this band’s arc. Yes, while indeed meditative to some degree what this lot produces is also as compelling in its immediacy as any ensemble you’d care to mention.

Go anywhere here, the lambent “Portrait of a Child,” all stunning – if immutable – hush and humility that in just under four minutes seems to encompass the entirety of this great stir of determined mystery we’re all thrown into from the moment we’re born; the relatively uptempo “Equinox” and it’s of-a-piece mate that follows it (“Desparu”) that rather surpass definition beyond referring to them as ‘more of the immersive, seemingly effortless same’ which, in the context of any other band, might seem a bit of a criticism but with RAIJ, seeing as that ‘same’ is precisely what they’ve gotten us addicted to over the decades (i.e. the shiveringly intoxicating), is pretty much nothing short of remarkable; to final track “Song of the Wandering Aengus,” the dusky, late-in-life Yeats poem rendered twice with a fate-accepting sonority by Tom O’Bedlam, his voice that of age-burnished wisdom – and acceptance – personified while the score behind him unspools like a requiem for the lost-but-hopeful amongst us be they living, gone, or barely holding on, and revel in one of the very few examples of so-called ‘pop’ music that doesn’t just border on the sublime but is made of the stuff, so soaked to its core with that pure elusive spirit of being that words tremble at the prospect of trying to describe it.

So, look. There’s a fair handful of bands and artists that, from this writer’s aesthetic perch, can pretty much do no wrong (Pete Astor comes to mind, The Monochrome Set, Sun Ra Magazine early XTC that’s enough for now) but for various reasons, not all of which are delineable, The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus doesn’t just belong to that class but are quite possibly at the head of it. They create via sound and voice an impact that’s emotionally and intellectually coincident with that of a novel that broke your heart while lifting your soul, of a scene from one of those movies that’s closest to the heat and sorrow of your own life’s experience, in the process amplifying that sweet ache of loveliness wherein, somewhat inexplicably, we sense like a breeze across our face the truest, most sublime essence of our existence in such a way as to make it not just tolerable but acceptable, and not just acceptable but, again, a thing of beauty and grace. Simply put, there’s no one more adept at the art of bringing the subtly vivid insinuations of these oddly-lived lives of ours into the light like the constantly-occuring epiphanies they are whether we recognize them as such or not, and on this singularly realized record, it feels a stride’s been hit that could hardly be outdone. And yet truthfully? We’d not be so foolish as to bet on that given the fact that, who knows, there just might be another RAIJ album in our future. But until then…