“You put words to the song/I’ll keep singing after you’re gone” is a phrase that acknowledges the ephemeral fragility of life and art, while also tracing a continuing thread that links generation after generation of creativity. Songwriters may pass, musicians may lay down their instruments, but the force of human connection through music flows onward, disheveled and lovely through the years and decades and centuries.
A band of Irish brothers threads the needle between spare, contemporary songwriting and reeling traditional stomps. The two, Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn, alternate ruminative confessionals and Celtic barn-raisers, their songs etched with melancholy but also lit up from inside with the joy of communal music making.