The Long March

Le Trio Joubran have been musical flag-bearers for the Palestinian people for more than a decade. For The Long March, brothers Samir, Wissam and Adnan Joubran have gone into the studio with Parisian producer Renaud Letang (who has worked with Björk, Manu Chao, Jean-Michel Jarre) and created a lush, largely instrumental album that is striking in its framing of the oud (lute) against an electronic music background. It is striking stuff, yet perhaps the finished album would work best as a soundscape or soundtrack for a particular event or film – the reverb added to the oud means notes echo from speakers, while the album's huge sense of drama can make The Long March overwhelming home listening.

I kept feeling a sense of dread, as if in a cinema and being cued by the music to expect something extraordinarily bleak in a film. Understandably, Le Trio Joubran are making music inspired by the horrors of Gaza and the Israeli occupation, but as part of bleak ambient soundscapes the oud can feel too much. Roger Waters (once of Pink Floyd and now a foremost celebrity critic of Israel) briefly lends his voice to the track ‘Carry the Earth’, the one non-instrumental number.