Some cities seem to have a life beyond normal geography: they are cultural meeting points, places where ideas are shared and grown and where art flourishes in new and specific ways. For the last few years, Dublin has been the foremost example of such places, giving us some of the most exciting and unique music of recent times. Varo are a crucial part of that scene. They ply their trade as a duo, but their second album, The World That I Knew (the long-awaited follow-up to their bewitching and accomplished self-titled 2020 debut), has a revolving cast of collaborators, picked judiciously from that fertile Dublin scene, and fostered by the sterling production of John ‘Spud’ Murphy, whose own mark on the resurgent Irish folk scene is indelible.
The core pairing of Consuelo Nerea Breschi and Lucie Azconaga (originally from Italy and France respectively, but long-settled in Ireland) are joined by a different artist or group on each of the album’s ten songs, and it makes for a remarkably diverse and unexpected set of songs. Red Robin, the album’s lead single, features the stunning Irish harp of Alannah Thornburgh. The harp’s usual lace-like complexity is offset by the toothsome vocal melodies. The song itself is an unusual one, casting a spell made up of deep nostalgia and longing, brightened by hope.
Ruth Clinton and Cormac Mac Diarmada add their voices to album opener Lovers and Friends, a song that relishes harmony, both in terms of its vocal arrangements and its themes of friendship and communality. The song’s dramatic fiddle sections add a sense of tension and ambiguity to proceedings. Singer Inni-K contributes to Heather on the Moor, alternately ghostly, urgent and pretty. Libby McCrohan adds her adroit bouzouki. The song flits between modes, a testament to the adaptability and versatility of folk music, and Varo’s skill at capturing and molding different moods.
This ability to harness varied emotional responses is keenly felt on individual tracks, but somehow over the whole album, the duo maintain a consistency of mood. There is a flow, a logical continuum, which is quite remarkable given the variety of artists on show. Green Grows the Laurel, with John Francis Flynn’s powerful and instantly recognisable vocals taking centre stage, is a distillation of the drama, melancholy and sense of resistance that can be felt in many of these songs. With its ethereal outro, it is also indicative of the strangeness that pervades Varo’s work and which makes them stand out from other traditional artists. Even in the moments of pureness and prettiness – like the unaccompanied Open the Door, with Wicklow singer Anne Mieke – have an underlying eeriness, a wildness condensed in the wordless, yearning wail of the backing vocals.
Varo are not averse to political statements, but they are made subtly and never to the detriment of the song. Green Grows the Laurel hints at the old animosity between Ireland and colonial Britain. The old bothy ballad Work Life Out to Keep Life In (with Niamh Bury, Angus MacAmhlaigh and Alex Borwick) seems witty and almost lighthearted on its surface, but conceals a level of trenchant social commentary that is more potent in post-Covid society than ever before.
There is an utterly beautiful version of Let No Man Steal Your Thyme with singing duo Lemoncelllo contributing to a novel arrangement featuring an irresistible combination of plucked and bowed strings. It is at once delicate and stormy, and the voices seem to come at you like winds from the four points of the compass. The inimitable Junior Brother sings on Skibbereen, aided by fiddler Ben McKenzie, providing one of the most fraught and emotionally uncompromising moments on the album. Here, the political and historical thread comes closest to the surface in a passionate narrative that takes in famine and failed uprisings. The social commentary remains clear in the next song, Sweet Liberty, suggested and sung by Lankum’s Ian Lynch. A ballad written two hundred years ago, its message of racial equality and freedom from oppression remains impactful to this day, and Lynch, in harmony with Breschi and Azconaga, delivers a typically formidable, compelling performance.
The World That I Knew represents the combination of years of work, an album with its roots in Covid lockdown, but with branches that spread through Dublin’s music scene and beyond. A lyric in the final track, Ewan MacColl’s Alone, provides the album with its title and also gives us some clue about its formation. ‘The world that I knew, it has vanished and gone,’ runs the opening line, to a dreamy, droning arrangement featuring Branwen and Slow Moving Clouds. Originally, the song spoke of personal anxieties and unspecified societal upheaval, but given this album’s gestation, it is easy to read it as a comment on the very real change that has taken place in the world in the last decade. Varo are brilliantly in tune with the various ways a song’s meaning can shift over time, and this collaborational format is perfect for documenting those shifts. The World That I Knew tracks contemporary concerns through traditional song, and it does so with beauty and fierce compassion.
The World That I knew (May 9th, 2025) Self Released
Order The World That I Knew: https://varodublin.bandcamp.com/album/the-world-that-i-knew-pre-order