The Gloaming - The Celtic-Folk Supergroup

Io sono una forza del passato

Only in tradition lies my love

Vengo dai ruderi, dalle chiese

dalle pale d'altare, dai borghi

abbandonati sugli Appenini e sulle Pre Alpi

dove sono vissuti i fratelli

I wander the Tuscolana like a madman

the Appia like a dog without a master

Or I watch the twilights, the mornings

over Rome, over Ciociaria, over the world

like the first acts of Afterhistory

which I witness, by privilege of birth

from the farthest edge of some buried age

Monstrous is he who is born

from the entrails of a dead woman

And I, adult fetus, wander about

more modern than any modern thing

searching for brothers who are no more

(Pier Paolo Pasolini, "10 giugno")

Tradition and modernity, antithetical concepts that often evaporate into semantic fog, in which they seem to become cyclical forces condemned to chase each other in an endless race. What is precious in the history of a country, a culture, a people? What is worth preserving, however anachronistic it may seem? What, on the other hand, is best discarded like an object worn out by time and no longer of use? What can still be learned from, and what has instead run its course?

These are some of the questions that a group of five musicians of varied backgrounds, all nonetheless connected, whether by culture or by birth, to Ireland, has chosen to plant in the mind of anyone who listens to their music — music that, more than in few other cases, is free of any fixed temporal placement, and which therefore ambitiously aims to be something eternally preservable, drawing on concepts firmly rooted in the culture of a wondrous land wrapped in mystery.

The ability to build and retain a sizeable audience outside its own homeland while basing its compositions on poems written in Gaelic (the ancient language native to certain areas of Ireland), and on melodies and harmonies that have been part of the collective unconscious of the Irish people for centuries, makes for a kind of unicum on the contemporary music scene. The five musicians have pulled off this feat by wonderfully distilling their deep bond with their roots into a "pop" sensibility in the noblest sense of the word.

The story of The Gloaming begins long before their actual releases might suggest. We need to go back to 1993, when a 12-year-old boy from Vermont went on holiday to Ireland with his parents. That boy's name was Thomas Bartlett, who, among other things, studied piano and nursed a deep passion for traditional Irish music – a passion that led him, during that holiday, to drag his parents along to several concerts by Martin Hayes, a fiddler from the west of Ireland who had moved to Chicago as a young man to work on various projects, and who had just released his debut solo album, "Martin Hayes", that same year. Thomas's sheer devotion even got him to meet the Irish fiddler in person and land him a gig in Vermont. At the time, though, neither of them could have imagined that such an ordinary encounter between a musician and a fan would, years later, spark a creative partnership that would change both their lives.

Young Thomas from Vermont then moved to New York, where he gradually made a name for himself as a producer, working with emerging indie names on the Big Apple scene, including artists who would soon go on to take the world by storm, such as The National and Sufjan Stevens.

In 2011, nearly twenty years after their first meeting, Martin Hayes was putting together a new musical project with his longtime partner Dennis Cahill (guitar) and singer Iarla Ó Lionárd, and he thought of Thomas, with whom he had stayed in touch in the meantime, inviting him to join the group. Bartlett accepted enthusiastically, bringing in fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh to complete the line-up, which, after some hesitation, settled on the name The Gloaming.

The group's mission was clear and immediately shared by all its members: to draw on traditional compositions and rhythms rooted in Irish soil, which the various members knew inside out, and give them a song form so as to make them accessible and appealing to a wider audience. For the lyrics, Iarla almost always turns to poems in Gaelic, whether traditional songs or more recent, modern compositions (he makes extensive use of the work of contemporary poet Liam Ó Murthuile). The band's splendid album covers, meanwhile, are chosen from the work of photographer Robert Parke Harrison, and they are extraordinary in how perfectly they mirror the atmospheres evoked by the band's music.

The group's chemistry and interplay were excellent right from the start, to the point that their debut album, The Gloaming, emerged in a surprisingly natural way out of their early jam sessions. It was recorded during the summer of 2012 at Grouse Lodge, a historic recording studio in the Irish countryside, and released on 20 January 2014 by Peter Gabriel's Real World Records, which would go on to put out all of their subsequent albums. Production was entirely in the hands of Thomas Bartlett.

It's hard to explain to anyone approaching this music for the first time what it means to hear the first plucked violin notes of "Song 44". It's as hard as it always is to put into words that wonderful feeling you get in the face of a breathtaking discovery, when the novelty of something completely unforeseen meets the satisfaction of taste that only art, in any shape or form, can provide. That is the incipit of "Song 44": plucked violin notes in the dark, an extraordinarily evocative voice, in a language that is unfamiliar yet somehow familiar. A new instrument, whose origin and qualities remain unknown. The entrance of Bartlett's piano and Hayes's fiddle projects us into the world we're about to enter: a melancholy, fluid existence, overwhelming in its simplicity. A dream we're deeply sorry to wake from, just like the one described in the 19th-century poem that Iarla delivers with force and despair. The composition is cyclical, built on a yin-yang between the hushed and the orchestral. The following "Alistrum's March" introduces us to the second type of structure that defines The Gloaming's records: an instrumental piece in which the fiddles' flourishes are underpinned by the foundations of Bartlett's piano. Instrumentals that evoke old Celtic melodies, alongside poetic ballads, are indeed a stylistic hallmark of the Irish supergroup.

A little further on, the almost pop-like melody of "Necklace Of Wrens" leads us to discover a limerick by 20th-century poet Michael Hartlett, delivered with a magnetic voice by Iarla, while on "Freedom" it's the singer who carries the entire track, this time an extremely intimate piece free of the grand orchestral openings that would become the band's guiding star. The lyrics, adapted from Sean Ó Riordáin's poem "Saoirse", hit exactly where they're meant to, and highlight another facet of the band: introducing and championing artists who, for linguistic reasons, had only ever found success in their own country. A rediscovery of Ireland, through and through, in other words.

The second half of the album features the two most ambitious compositions of this debut: "Old Bush" stands out from the other tracks for its darker, almost sinister atmosphere, in which Hayes gives free rein to the most experimental side of his repertoire, with a melody that borders on the shrill. Accompanied by the "dripping" notes of Bartlett's piano, the song unfolds in a touching, swirling, intoxicating progression, like a twisted dance in which you quickly lose your bearings, but one where finding them again just as quickly becomes entirely beside the point.

This walk down a dark path is merely the prelude to the true masterpiece of The Gloaming, namely the nearly 17 minutes of "Opening Set", a splendid, far-reaching mix of virtuoso passages in which every musician gets their own dedicated space, and although these are essentially solos, nothing about it feels redundant. The slow, intimate opening of piano, violin and voice (one can never tire of pointing out just how essential Ó Lionárd is to the success of these pieces, with performances that leave you breathless; in this case especially, the melancholy and the quiet despair that seep through the verses are disarming) is soon shaken up by the twists and turns of Hayes's fiddle, the true hallmark of The Gloaming's sound (just as the fiddle, in general, is the cornerstone of all traditional Irish music). As has rightly been observed, the progression of "Opening Set" builds layer upon layer, not unlike the process a painter follows in composing a painting. It's a truly extraordinary composition, one that quite naturally finds its ultimate sublimation in live performance (it's easy to find highly recommended live videos online). The closing "Samradh Samradh", finally, returns to ballad form, sealed by Hayes's fiddle and a handful of watercolour-like chords from Thomas's piano.

The Gloaming is a marvellous debut, in which the ceaseless interplay between vibrant instrumental tracks and spot-on folk melodies woven together with literature works the miracle of transporting us, for just under an hour, into the beating heart of the most authentic Ireland – where, between a dance with a thousand years of history and a poem telling of heroes and princesses, we can immerse ourselves in art's purest, most overflowing form.

The album was a huge success in Ireland and the UK, but it also made its mark beyond the British Isles, landing on the year-end lists of numerous magazines and winning the Choice Music Prize (awarded to the best album by Irish artists), beating out sacred monsters such as U2 and Sinéad O'Connor along the way. The tour to promote it brought The Gloaming a string of small triumphs, including three sold-out nights at the Dublin Concert Hall in February 2015. During the tour, seizing the momentum, the band began writing part of its sophomore record, recorded in December 2015 in Bath at Real World Studios. As Iarla put it, the album was meant to try moving in new directions, also drawing on the growing rapport among the group's members. Hayes himself described the new creation as "something with more feeling". In short, all the conditions were there for them not to disappoint after such a debut.

The Gloaming 2, often shortened simply to "2", came out on 26 February 2016, and any doubts were immediately swept away by the gorgeous opener "Pilgrim's Song". Once again it's poet Sean Ó Riordáin who provides the source for the lyrics of this hushed ballad, which begins tentatively (an ideal link to the previous album), before the fiddles burst in with a less melancholy, more traditional melody, in a climax that cyclically winds down to a delicate ending, where a few piano notes accompany Iarla's hypnotic, magnetic voice, once again delivering a flawless performance. On the following "Fainleog", a rarely-matched beauty of an opening is entrusted to piano and violin, seldom so melancholy, as if fresh out of some ancient fairy tale steeped in the Middle Ages, castles and princesses to be rescued. Whereas on The Gloaming the album's structure rested on a balanced interplay between melancholy ballads and more tradition-bound instrumental pieces, the opening one-two of "2" veers in a different direction. Both "Pilgrim's Song" and "Fainleog" are extraordinary tracks in their complexity, in how they manage to marry overflowing emotion with enormous technical skill, always in service of a purpose and never merely showing off. Although the two tracks share a similar structure, the solutions never feel predictable, thanks to a remarkable ability to keep renewing melodic ideas without ever growing tiresome. The building finale of "Fainleog" is extraordinary in this respect: the dialogue between the two fiddles of Hayes and Ó Raghallaigh is dazzling, and could go on forever.

Although, as mentioned, some sense of departure from the first album could already be felt in the opening two tracks, "Oisin's Song" marks a further step away from the repertoire the Irish group had offered up until then. The atmospheres are darker, almost ghostly, amplifying and expanding on the sensations stirred by that masterpiece "The Old Bush", systematically introducing stylistic traits that had only made a timid appearance on the 2013 track. While remaining, as is the band's hallmark, firmly tied to folk traditions, the darker planes of the melodies venture into unexplored territory. The following "The Booley House", on the other hand, brings back the band's classic themes, with a melody that is once again sensational and deeply emotional. If, as Victor Hugo once said, melancholy is the joy of being sad, few tracks better bear out that theory, constantly balanced between joy and sorrow like an old photograph of a distant yet still vivid memory.

Further on, melody once again takes the lead role in the ballad "Casadh an tSúgáin", a spare piano-and-voice pop piece that rightfully ranks among the finest moments in The Gloaming's discography, for its ability to combine intimacy, restraint and a sure sense of direction.

After the instrumental semi-jam session of "The Rolling Wave", with the piano underpinning and counterpointing this sinuous duet, comes the other "new" track on "2". "Cucanandy" originates from a children's nursery rhyme: after the usual instrumental opening, English appears as well, for the first time in The Gloaming's discography, in an ethereal, almost slow-motion second part that would be perfect for some final scene from "The Tree Of Life".

In the closing stretch, while Bartlett's classical leanings (Chopin) surface in the intimate "Mrs. Dwyer", "Slan le Maighe" brings Hayes's fiddle back to the fore, especially in the solo of the piece's first section, introducing a wonderful poem by Aindrias Mac Craith, an 18th-century author regarded as the last great Gaelic poet, recounting the loneliness of a man forced to bid farewell to everything he has. The track, one of the most moving and best realized on the record, is striking for its ability to conjure images and places with nothing but the force of two instruments (first Hayes's fiddle, then Iarla's voice). The closing honours go to the instrumental "The Old Favourite", yet another fine display brimming with talent and faded yet still-vivid old memories.

What makes The Gloaming 2 extraordinary is that it strikes with the same weapons as its wonderful predecessor, but wields them differently, like a craftsman adapting to what the era and the times demand, without overreaching, yet aware that even for a band that turns the cornerstones of its own tradition into a stylistic mantra, it's necessary to tweak the recipe to keep convincing. Though perhaps falling just short of the extraordinary debut, this sophomore effort makes clear that the band hasn't lost an ounce of its creative spark, its ability to conjure moods, spaces and states of mind through music rooted in such distant times and memories tied to such a distinctive culture, while making it all accessible to a far wider audience.

The Gloaming 2 matches the success of its predecessor, receiving a more than positive reception from critics, and the group also kicks off a tour that takes the five musicians to play in the biggest cities of Europe and North America.

The band spends 2016 and 2017 touring in support of the record. At the start of 2018, RTÉ, a well-known Irish broadcaster, announces that the band's only scheduled live date of 2018, at Dublin's National Concert Hall, would be released as a live album. The work, titled Live At The NCH, comes out on March 2, 2018, and contains live versions of six tracks, five drawn from "2" and the sole "The Sailor's Bonnet" taken from the debut album. The tracks also showcase, in recorded form, the band's extraordinary live chops, with the closing "Fainleog" — whose live rendition runs close to 20 minutes — serving as the artistic summa of the entire release.

After the long 2017 tour and the live album from early 2018, the band begins work on their third studio album, which, following the path already set by the sophomore record, is christened The Gloaming 3, or simply "3". After a lengthy gestation, the album is released on February 22, 2019, again on Real World, but for the first time the five band members leave Britain and decide to record at Reservoir Studios in New York, capitalizing on Thomas Bartlett's growing profile in the United States.

The central question, once again, is whether the band can hold its own at the level of the first two albums, keeping its bond with tradition intact and credible while simultaneously finding the ability to chart different paths so as not to fall into the dreaded trap of "been there, done that". And The Gloaming once again confirm their talent, proving capable of renewing themselves within territory that remains familiar yet still rich with new possible ideas and insights.

The opening, as with the two previous works, is once again extraordinarily on point: "The Weight Of Things" is one of the absolute peaks of The Gloaming's output. The lyrics are drawn from a magnificent 2013 poem by Liam O'Muirthile. An extraordinary interplay of verses speaking of life and death, of loss, of far and near, of grand vistas and small things, which Iarla manages to translate with enviable skill into an uptempo alternation of lines: the sense of the "weight of things" hinted at in the text is faithfully conveyed through a frantic, almost delirious vocal delivery, skilfully alternated with orchestral openings that grant a few moments of ecstatic pause within this nearly eight-minute sprint. "The Weight Of Things" is yet another splendid sonic guise worn by the Irish quintet.

After this disorienting incipit, the instrumental "The Lobster" leads us back to familiar territory: Bartlett's distinctive, almost "dripping" style accompanies this dance led by the two fiddles, in a composition that now ranks among The Gloaming's traditional songs. The following "Athas" proves to be a condensation of emotion: another O'Muirthile poem adorns a splendid melody that seems to arrive from another time, giving rise to one of the finest tracks in the set. And while "The Pink House" climbs on an almost "solo" Hayes melody before building to a climax as the other fiddle forges its way in — almost like an Antonioni film that could begin at any moment and whose end could likewise fall at any moment — the following "Reo" reintroduces atmospheres already heard in "Oisin's Song", somewhat darker than the band's classic orchestral openings, only to then veer into a rhythmic fiddle interlude; a pattern repeated twice within the track.

In "Sheehan's Jigs" Hayes's fiddle again takes centre stage, bordering on the strident in places, while the theme of life's fleeting nature resurfaces in the verses of "My Lady Who Has Found The Tomb Unattended", where almost dark atmospheres, worthy of Nick Cave's "The Firstborn Is Dead" by Nick Cave, are introduced beneath the band's usual traditional guise. The intriguing "Doctor O'Neill" once again showcases the group's ambition through its multifaceted shifts: the opening borders on the avant-garde, as if Scott Walker's "Tilt" had been welcomed into the Irish collective, while around the midpoint of the track, the fiddles of Hayes and O'Raghallaigh weave into a seductive melody that proceeds relentlessly, buoyed by Bartlett's piano, before condensing into a kind of accelerated, melancholy waltz.

So with their third studio chapter as well, The Gloaming confirm the soundness of a uniquely musical vision, one truly missed in today's folk landscape, unveiling verses and melodies from a mysterious land still partly unknown, carrying us to abandoned places, along steep green cliffs, and into wooden houses warmed by welcoming hearths. Once again proving how certain themes — the impermanence of earthly existence and how to face it, the search for meaning in life, and the capacity to meet daily challenges — form a common thread running through every folk tradition and art form. Language, as Wittgenstein might object, is the true limit to ever fully grasping this concept, and yet The Gloaming manage to clear that hurdle without ever once betraying their homeland, instead stirring in us, through their splendid melodies, a genuine curiosity toward a slice of musical culture still waiting to be discovered.

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