The Gloaming – The Gloaming 3
Real World – 22 February 2019
Eight years ago American singer, pianist and producer Thomas Bartlett joined four of Ireland’s most gifted traditional musicians to explore ideas for a collaborative project that would filter traditional forms through contemporary influences, with enthralling results. The music they developed together, as The Gloaming, was immediately hailed as ground-breaking and earned the quintet an almost instant international reputation. This month the band release their third studio album – The Gloaming 3.
Last year’s live release, The Gloaming – Live at the NCH (reviewed here), brought the band’s music full circle, as live performance has, from the very outset, been as much at the heart and soul of The Gloaming as the traditions that inspire their music. The Gloaming 3, sees the band take the step into the unknown that the cover illustration would suggest; with an album largely conceived, born and nurtured in the studio. Every moment of the seventy minutes of music that follow the persistent metronomic monotone of Bartlett’s piano opening, prove that taking their music this close to the edge has brought unimagined creativity.
World-renowned fiddle player Martin Hayes had inspired Thomas Bartlett at a young age. When he and long term musical partner, guitarist Dennis Cahill, were joined by Bartlett’s perfectly measured minimalism and the rich, earthy tones of Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh’s 10-string Hardanger, there could be no doubt the results would be unique. Add to that alliance, though, Iarla Ó Lionáird’s astounding sean-nós vocal, and the rich literary tradition he draws upon, and the music of The Gloaming set a whole new standard of excellence. In the course of two rapturously received albums and a series of captivating live tours, The Gloaming have earned a worldwide reputation for the quality and diversity of their performances.
The opening piano is joined by an equally emphatic vocal for Meáchan Rudaí (The Weight Of Things), as Ó Lionáird delivers, like an incantation, an extract from the late Liam Ó Muirthile’s prose poem of the same name. The enveloping, absorbing sound that is a trademark of The Gloaming’s music moves on towards a stately dance with Hayes’ fiddle, which seems to take to the wind as deep bass notes on the piano contrast with the monotone, just as a soaring vocal contrasts with the enchantment of the powerful early litany. Áthas (Joy), takes more of Ó Muirthile’s work in reverent tones that embrace the soul, alongside gentle piano chords, a mournful Hardanger and the softest of guitar. Áthas is taken from Ó Muirthile’s Camino de Santiago pilgrimage poems, which were published in Irish, English, Spanish, and Galego [Galician].
Where song forms part of The Gloaming’s music the source, and inspiration, is often Irish poetry – both ancient and contemporary. The delivery of that poetry is also intricately linked to the musical traditions. During the great Seán Ó Ríordáin’s poem Reo, Martin Hayes softly opens a jig, as if proffering a world of possibilities, but the song isn’t quite ready until the power of the vocal increases. The gently stepping rhythm is taken up by Bartlett’s piano, and the jig and grows bolder. These boundaries between the changes in pace are barely perceived, but the change itself seems to course through your veins.
Tune sets often leave no doubt about their intentions, from the outset. The Old Road to Garry is a trio of reels that form a delightful piano/fiddle duet, joined by an eager Hardanger. The Lobster is a more extensive set, where the band display their mastery at building on a theme, and The Boy In The Gap is a gorgeous theme to build on. Hardanger opens Sheehan’s Jigs, taking the melody on a light breeze until Hardanger and fiddle harmonize like siblings.
The Pink House proves that a tune set needn’t call you to the dance floor. A gently presented march that ambles along hypnotically until Bartlett explores new avenues in the set’s Four Note Jig, and gentle harmonies from guitar and Hardanger wind slowly towards a peaceful, resigned conclusion. The mighty Doctor O’Neill opens in darkness, with piano weaving among lighter strings in an exploration that rejects temporal boundaries and epitomises The Gloaming’s approach. Taking as much from jazz as it does from tradition; pace, melody and harmony shift and swirl, rise and fall, until piano finds joy in the sweetest of overtones that guide the strings to the rousing crescendo.
The Gloaming 3 does seem to find its soul in shadow, and there’s more than a touch of pathos in the piano and melancholy in the Hardanger that open My Lady Who Has Found the Tomb Unattended. The 17th-century poetry of Eoghan Ruadh Mac an Bhaird explores the contrasts between the solitude of grief in exile and the communal grief offered by the keening women (mná caointe). Ó Lionáird’s vocal is coloured by sorrow, and perhaps even a sense of wonder, as it seems to take on the role of storyteller and abandon a degree or two of his usual precision in favour of theatre before taking the song on a departing wind. Amhrán na nGleann (The Song of The Glens) closes the album with challenging tones, in a song Ialra has sung since his childhood. There’s clearly still room for exploration, though, in an all but unaccompanied vocal that soars over an ethereal droning and plucking of strings.
The music of The Gloaming connects to the soul like no other, and The Gloaming 3 is an even wider exploration of the possibilities that music presents. The peerless understanding of the tradition that Martin Hayes, Dennis Cahill and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh bring, unite with the ancient and contemporary voices that seem to emerge directly from Iarla Ó Lionáird’s soul, all underpinned by the elemental constancy of Thomas Bartlett’s piano, and his ubiquitous presence as producer. The Gloaming 3 is a bold, beguiling, magnificent album.
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