"Sometimes this does become easy, yearning music, as in the obvious and ambient washes of Saturnian Meeting. But in general there's compelling difference here, in an album that deliberately avoids slavish or embarrassing homage. Though inspired by Brandwein, Tarras and the New World revival pantheon, after working in New York with David Krakauer, surprisingly less traditional arrangements of familiar melodies and motifs emerged - in the Carnegie Hall, supporting Gogol Bordello, touring the Americas - as they played fast and loose with rules and expectations. La Loteria En Babelonia is typical, built around simple but radically urgent rhythms, dramatic and needy, avoiding any needless show of virtuosity, with a strangely muted brass battery in the backgound, and a weird and different harp-driven momentum in the vast landscape of the foreground. It's imaginative, moving and brassily abrupt".
