The legendary director joins the star of his new film HARD TRUTHS Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the Criterion Closet, where they share their love for Akira Kurosawa and Charles Burnett, reminisce about early moviegoing experiences, and select favorites for each other.
Ye Vagabonds: All Tied Together – Five stars for this powerfully raw modern trad
By Ed Power | Irish Times
Among the new wave of critically acclaimed Irish folk artists, it has been all too easy to overlook the Ye Vagabonds siblings, Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn. Although their music has long had a beautifully rapturous quality, they lack the in-your-face wow factor of the Mercury-nominated drone punks Lankum or the storytelling charm of John Francis Flynn.
Their moment of recognition may at last be at hand with this stunning album for Geoff Travis’s River Lea label, a wonderfully vulnerable collection rooted in angst and woe but carried aloft by a poetic defiance.
Recorded in a house in Galway, All Tied Together is a powerfully raw listen that comes off as a sort of craggy Irish Simon & Garfunkel, the effect heightened by luminous harmonies and keening instrumentation.
Tender yet never maudlin, with diaristic lyrics about tragic break-ups and unfulfilled futures, it knits together the ancient and the modern with haunting verve. One moment you’re soaking up the turf‑fire glow of On Sitric Road, the opening track; the next the LP knocks you backwards with the dam‑busting instrumental refrain of The Flood.
Above all, it arrives as a blessed relief amid trying times for Irish traditional music. In one sense the genre has never been more acclaimed: Lankum headline festivals around the world; and the vampire caper Sinners, which has been nominated for a record-breaking 16 Oscars, including for its score, soundtracks a pivotal scene with a modern take on Rocky Road to Dublin, complete with Riverdancing undead.
But, as often happens in the music industry, the renaissance in trad has now been commodified. This has been brought painfully home over the past year with the existential horror that is Kingfishr’s Killeagh, an ode to the east Cork hurling team that marks the coming of age of the new “boggercore” genre.
Boggercore has been with us a while – it stretches, via the 2 Johnnies, right back to D’Unbelievables. But with Kingfishr and their sonic and sartorial clones Amble it came into its kingdom as a cynical dumbing down of the great strides made by traditional over the previous decade.
This isn’t to question anybody’s taste – people like what they like – or to pit, say, Lankum against Kingfishr. It’s merely to acknowledge that in every genre there comes a moment when the mainstream wants a piece of the action. That, alas, was trad’s fate in 2025 – to which we can only say, “Killeagh, nah, nah-nah”.
Without ever intending to, Ye Vagabonds offer some much‑needed spiritual respite from that bleak trend with the sublime All Tied Together. It’s as stark as a shriek, as murkily mysterious as bogwater and lit by a constant sense of curiosity and wonder.
The album also marks a new chapter for the duo, who were raised as Irish speakers in Carlow and went on to become embedded in Dublin’s folk underground.
Among their fans is the Boygenius singer Phoebe Bridgers, who asked for Ye Vagabonds to open for the indie supergroup in Dublin in 2023.
They pour all of those experiences into tracks such as Danny, a starkly modern tale of a young man unravelling in contemporary Ireland (“His girlfriend hit the needle … You could see that she was fading / By the shadows round his eyes”).
As with the best modern trad, the project constantly takes risks – on Gravity they fuse the melancholy of Irish folk with the menacing bite of postrock. The mood then swerves back to a-cappella pop on Mayfly, a tune that lives up to its name with its beautifully flitting evanescence.
A record full of cries and whispers ends with the hush of Forget About the Rain, which frames the siblings’ voices with gentle piano and guitar. It is heartbreakingly sad – as many of the songs here are – yet ultimately this is an album sure to fill its listeners with joy.
Treasa Ní Mhiolláin sings “Lord Gregory”
The singer, Treasa Ní Mhiolláin (which could be Anglicised as ‘Theresa Mullin’), is a native Irish speaker from Inis Mór (‘Inishmore’), one of the Aran Islands off the western coast of Ireland.
A woman comes to Gregory’s castle, pleading to be let in; she is either pregnant or with a newborn son. His mother turns her away; sometimes she tells her that he went to sea, and she goes to follow him and dies in shipwreck. Gregory wakes and says he dreamed of her. He chases her, finds her body, and dies.
Alternate titles of “The Lass of Roch Royal” include “Lord Gregory”, “Fair Anny”, “Oh Open the Door Lord Gregory”, “The Lass of Loch Royal” “The Lass of Aughrim”, and “Mirk Mirk”.
Ethnic cleansing in Ohio
Nazi Lies in Vance’s America
By Timothy Snyder
In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined victims are ten thousand or more Haitians.
Its origins are in racist fantasy. During the last presidential campaign, JD Vance, then the vice-presidential nominee, put the Haitians of Springfield at the center of national attention. Temporary Protected Status had been granted to non-citizen Haitians in the US after an earthquake in Haiti killed more than 200,000 people; it was extended after the Haitian president was assassinated. This allowed ten thousand or more Haitians to gather in Springfield, a small city between Dayton and Columbus, and to work. Vance heard about Haitians in Springfield, from a city manager who wanted federal assistance for housing. He turned a reasonable request into a racial crusade.
In a speech of 10 July 2024, Vance claimed that “Springfield, Ohio has been overwhelmed” by Haitian immigrants. Although there was certainly friction over schools and housing, there was no basis for such a judgement. In fact, Springfield was doing better economically than in any moment in Vance’s lifetime. In the months to follow, he would return to the theme, publishing a number of inflammatory claims about Haitians in Springfield, not a single one of which was true. As we will see, Vance’s goal was not so much to get individual lies on the record; it was rather to create a self-sustaining story, in which a real place and its real people could become the raw material for an alternative Nazi reality — I use the word advisedly. Vance had help in expanding his theme, and crucial helpers were Nazis.
In American terms, Haitians are Black; and the American group Blood Tribe are white-supremacist blood-obsessed Nazis. After Vance’s speech, Blood Tribe took its cue. Blood Tribe had marched in other cities in the previous two years, wearing masks, distinctive uniforms, and carrying banners with swastikas. These marches were unmistakably Nazi. Vance’s speech drew the attention of Blood Tribe to Springfield. On 10 August 2024, members of Blood Tribe carried out their usual performance in the city’s downtown, two of them carrying banners with swastikas and another two brandishing automatic rifles. Mayor Rob Rue called the march “an attempt to disrupt our community by an outside hate group.” Blood Tribe responded on social media: “We hear that you have a real problem with Haitian ‘refugees.’”
And from whom did they “hear” this? JD Vance.