Named after the archaic Scots word for the dusk, the music of The Gloaming is tailor-made to be listened to in the twilight hours as daylight fades.
The band's unimaginatively titled sophomore release continues where their celebrated 2013 debut left off. The roots to this form of music go deep but this quintet, billed in the States as an Irish supergroup", are anything but slaves to tradition.
The pure Irish contingent are fiddlers Martin Hayes and Caoimhin Ó Raghallaigh together with old-style (Sean-nós) singer Iarla Ó Lionáird.
Guitarist Dennis Cahill has Irish parentage but was raised in Chicago while the one 'outsider' is pianist Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman) from New York.
As with their eponymous first album, Bartlett is also the producer although this time around the recording was done at Real World Studios rather than in Ireland's Grouse Lodge.
As before, the skipping jigs and reels of Hayes, from County Clare, contrast with Raghallaigh's more resonant droning hardanger fiddle or else are counterbalanced by the piano; the inclusion of which is the band's most obvious departure from a traditional Irish sound.
The tunes are rooted in social, community-based music but the celebratory element is always tempered by hints of more personal, reflective textures.
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A tune like Cucanandy, for instance, could so easily have been rendered as a vibrant dance tune but Lionáird's singing never strays from its elegiac quality that invests the material with a melancholic sense of longing.
His hymnal vocals, all sung in his native Gaelic Irish language, are a truly magical ingredient in the band's sound and grace half of the twelve tracks.
In a record of so many highlights, the opener - The Pilgrim's Song - is perhaps the most complete and spiritually uplifting piece here. It matters not that it is sung in a 'foreign' tongue since the emotional force shines through regardless.
As with the album as a whole, this track is performed both with a meticulous attention to detail and a liberating sense of joy.
The Gloaming's website
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