Songs of Yearning is the fourth RAIJ album - comninng eastern religious sounds and iconography, acoustic and electric instrumentation, and lilting, meditative vocals, Songs of Yearning features pieces in no fewer than six different languages: Greek, French, English, Latin, a Finnish dialect of Swedish and Russian.

'9/10 Remarkable - alluringly strange"
Uncut Magazine

'I have never before heard anything quite like this album. And since I first listened to it at a friend’s urging this past weekend, I find myself returning to it again and again. It resists description, yet compels a response; it’s utterly fresh but feels like it’s been around forever.

Working as a loose creative collective since the mid-1980s, Liverpool’s Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus have consistently pursued what they describe as “echoes of the sacred” in their work, striving to access a sonic space where transcendence can invade a stiflingly measured-out world. On their fourth album Songs of Yearning, they’ve discovered new room for rumors of glory to run, and the result is uniquely powerful, its resonance strikingly amplified by the shadows of doubt that now openly stalk our lives.

RAIJ’s music calls to mind much that I’ve heard and loved over the years — abstract soundscapes by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno; the “holy minimalism” of composers Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki; the sparse, charged post-rock Talk Talk found with Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, to name a few. But comparisons to other artists fall short of describing Songs of Yearning’s rich mix of reticent modesty and bold experiment. Dissecting the music into its component parts — a breathtaking gamut of sound sourced from liturgy, folksong, chamber music, pop & rock of all stripes, ambience, industrial noise, found dialogue and much more — won’t do the trick either. The only way to catch the breadth and depth of what’s here is to dive in.'
Spirit of Cecelia

‘Haunting and beautiful: The third album from this strange Liverpool collective is as affecting and pacifying a collection of songs as you will hear
It has taken 33 years — during which time this decidedly strange Liverpool collective have put out only three albums and done virtually no interviews — for the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus to become sort of au courant. Which is perhaps why they have suddenly, in a wholly unforeseen bout of activity, put out two in the same week. The other is the limited edition Nocturnes. Given our current predicament, the simple iron church bell that tolls here and there on this album should be resonant enough. But musical fashion has swung around a little to this band, too. Whereas once they would have been filed under minimalist modern classical, of interest only to those who hanker after Gavin Bryars and maybe Arvo Part, now you can see traces of conventional and established bands such as Azure Ray and Arcade Fire in this genuinely haunting and beautiful collection of, er, stuff.
No bangin’ choons, no rockin’ out. Sonorous cello, plangent piano, judicious use of feedback, oddly conventional acoustic guitar, whispered or spoken vocals, as often as not in French. Or maybe Russian. Fragments of tunes drift in and out, or build into a fugue, sometimes dissonant. Their agreeable obsession with religious imagery and religious music, especially that from east of the Elbe, persists. These songs of yearning are, in fact, hymns; but what exactly they are hymns to is another issue.
This is as affecting and pacifying a collection of songs as you will hear for a long time. Go on, be one of the 14 people in the country who buys a copy.’
The Spectator