SHOULD YOU ever want an intelligent concentration of the demonic possessiveness of post-folk groups like Lankum or ONYX, then sibling unit Ye Vagabonds will surely tick the boxes.
Brothers Diarmuid and Brían Mac Glionn’s fourth album is their first work of entirely original material, so it seems only right and proper that All Tied Together (River Lea Records) tells a personal story.
Indeed it does, as songs such as On Sitric Road, Cuckoo Storm, Where the Heart Lies, and Forget About the Rain outline a fitful journey from gigs in pub lock-ins to sharing stages with the likes of Hozier.
There is remorse attached to most songs here, but there is also the roughage of lived experience; such a blend lifts the album out of the norm, kicking the traditional conservatism of Irish folk bands like Amble and Kingfishr into the middle of the road.
ONE OF Ireland’s less categorizable musical units is Anúna, a vocal/choral ensemble guided by the prolific musical polyglot that is Michael McGlynn.
Far removed from their initial origins as an adjunct of the Riverdance theatrical experience, McGlynn pitches Tochairm (Danú) as “a reimagining of a whole subset of my music, mostly about landscape…”.
Sonically recreated and reimagined by McGlynn and noted Irish sound engineer Brian Masterson, the music collects pieces composed over the four decades and repositions them in a more immersive way than previously.
The overall impact of the music is receiving a welcome wash of sound that lingers long into the night; it is music that might never be viewed as cutting edge or (God forbid!) cool, but it has its own internal, illustrious qualities.
SPEAKING of which, Dubliner A.S. Fanning is a Berlin-based musician who was named Songwriter of the Year 2023 by Far Out magazine.
Mention the name to Irish music fans and their faces might, perhaps justifiably, draw a blank, but if that’s the case, then we are the ones missing out. The songs on Take Me Back to Nowhere (Proper Octopus) are pitched somewhere between the intensity of The The and the delivery of Nick Cave, so anyone expecting jingly-jangly pop songs may have to walk into the woods to reconsider their position.
Rather, appreciate the joys of (as Fanning himself describes it) “the fragile nature of our reality, and general unease about many aspects of our present.”
YOU MIGHT say the same about Cork shoegaze/post-rock band Ways of Seeing. Fronted by multi-instrumentalist James O’Donnell, the band’s second album, The Inheritance of Fear (Joyful Hour Records), is a serious piece of work.
Influenced by poetry (the album title is taken from Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s poem, An Experiment to Engineer an Inheritance of Fear), Philip Larkin (on the song Cruel, Naturally), Samuel Beckett (on the reflective track Godot), and Francis Bacon (via O’Donnell’s thoughts of the fear of death on Premonition, the album’s ominous opening track), what we have here is a collection of songs that have been nurtured (if that’s the word) by illness and loss.
The latter is referenced by the short but emphatically lovely instrumental, Solat, which pays tribute to Cork musician Eoin French, a former bandmate of O’Donnell’s who died last year.
Produced by acclaimed Irish musician Daniel Fox, Ways of Seeing bursts from the traps from the outset, leaving in its sonic wake a series of ripple-effect tunes that stay with you like a bruise.
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