Tokyo Bloodworm – Palestine

Last seen on moteer:: collaborating with fellow US travelers Brael on the delightful ( and well received) Living Language album, this time R.A Sanchez and Ryan Keane have gone it alone. Well not quite. A host of friends have contributed to the cause, adding smatterings of marimba, cello, mandolins and flutes (with notable contributions from film scorer and asthmatic kitty artiste William Ryan Fritch) to proceedings. It’s this sense of collective orchestral cooperation, so sensitively conducted by the band, that sets this release out as some kind of sorrowful epic.

Palestine is every inch the tortured, difficult, beguiling epic that should define a band and a label. Recorded between 2006 and 2009 the pieces that form the sum of the record are separate scenes swathed in (middle) eastern twilight and north western winters. If that sounds pretentious, then good, it’s the last one of these I’m ever going to write. Think of Chris Cole’s Manyfingers project but without the euphoric crescendos or Mark Hollis if he’d decamped to the desert to record his next record.