YE VAGABONDS - All Tied Togheter

We overlooked them for almost a decade, but by the time of their fifth album, brothers Brian and Diarmuid MacGloinn can no longer be considered the exclusive preserve of Irish folk devotees. Especially now that they've decided to set aside traditional repertoire for their first album made up entirely of original songs.

Produced by Philip Weinrobe (Big Thief), "All Tied Togheter" is, for Ye Vagabonds, an album of reflection and of consolidating their musical roots. A heritage in which Danny Thompson walks hand in hand with John Prine ("On Sitric Road"), where the jazz contamination boasts the same inventive harmonic acrobatics as the Incredible String Band ("I'll Keep Singing" and its elegant string arrangement).

This is an unfashionable record from the Irish duo, an intense and poetic tale that keeps its distance from the drone-music forays of bands like Lankum, even if it hints at that magic in the heavy hum of “Gravity”. Ye Vagabonds tell a folk story that still chases the spirit of the old storytellers, as on the splendid “Young Again”.

Brian and Diarmuid MacGloinn have absorbed the tradition so thoroughly that they've put together a string of songs that already sound like lovable classics ("Long Grass"). Those who love the new at all costs may well hold back from praising its grace, but "All Tied Togheter" is an album akin to David Crosby's If You Could Only Remember My Name ("Four Walls"): even when the sound wraps itself around a melancholy romanticism, tenderness wins out over mawkishness ("Young Again").

Recorded live in a home studio in Galway, the MacGloinn brothers' new album blends sun-drenched Californian days with misty Irish atmospheres (“Cuckoo Storm”), draws on the fiddle's fluttering tones for a troubled pagan dance (“The Flood”), then soars toward starry landscapes with the same sense of wonder (“Mayfly”), before finally settling into places that only seem more comforting, with an intense choral melody that, like life itself, draws out both a smile and a tear (“Forget About The Rain”).

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24/02/2026