Listeners unfamiliar with bagpipes (specifically the Scottish smallpipes) who hit play on Brìghde Chaimbeul’s last record, 2023’s Carry Them with Us, immediately got a strong dose of the instrument: a bright, blaring drone held for around 25 seconds before Chaimbeul and eventually Colin Stetson on saxophone introduced notes, melody, variation. One way to sum up what’s different about the new Sunwise is that we again begin with a drone, a deeper and darker one, but here it’s held for nearly six minutes. It’s almost two-thirds of “Dùsgadh/Waking” and even when Chaimbeul starts layering plaintive calls over it, that drone thrums away powerfully in the background. The effect is stunning, in a couple of senses of the term.
It also plays into, thematically, what she’s doing here. The title of Sunwise refers to a traditional Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) practice in Scotland, and on its first half Chaimbeul’s playing draws on stories and folklore around the setting in of winter and the desolate stretch that follows. It consists of just two lengthy tracks (with "A' Chailleach” seeing the single return of Stetson this time around), both written by Chaimbeul and among her most striking work yet. After a brief interlude of a crackling fireplace, the second half has a variety of shorter, livelier pieces all adapted from traditional tunes (except “Duan,” with her father Aonghas Phàdraig Chaimbeul reciting a rhyme associated with the ritual that gives the album its title). After playing live by herself so much in the past few years, Chaimbeul also recorded mostly on her own (others adding parts later, if at all) with the exception of the spritely “Sguabag/The Sweeper,” capturing her and three other pipers together.
After the stark, almost severe power of the first half, which evokes winter even without knowing any backstory (yes, even in the midst of our current heat dome), the relative lightness of touch on those shorter pieces doesn’t read as rejecting or denying the season so much as showing how people get through it. Even more so than on the excellent Carry Them with Us there’s a powerfully ceremonial feeling to this set of songs, aided by the even more minimal instrumental lineup and that frosty, imposing first side. Of course, just as the seasons inevitably change, Sunwise thaws as it goes on, until it ends with the minute-long “The Rain Is Wine & The Stones Are Cheese,” a duet with her and her brother Eòsaph singing in a traditional style used to vocalize the sound of the bagpipes. It’s used “to mark the longest and therefore darkest night of the year” and sends this album off just as the corner has been turned; winter has set in, been endured, and now the days will slowly get longer.
First of all, for any interested non-Gaelic speakers, the young Scottish piper’s name is (per her own site) pronounced “Bree-chu CHaym-bul.” And secondly, while the music found on this, her third album, sounds like what most would identify as bagpipes, it’s… well it is and it isn’t. To the extent that bagpipes are known to the wider world it’s something like the great Highland bagpipe (musician blowing into a reed, pipes extending over shoulder). Chaimbeul can certainly play that too, but she specializes more in the Scottish smallpipes, a bellow-driven instrument of more recent vintage (the 80s!) albeit from a lineage going back hundreds of years. The details are worth noting up front, because the music on Carry Them With Us is so viscerally enchanting it might be hard to keep track of them once you’re mid-listen.
Both varieties of bagpipe share some seemingly contradictory qualities. Drone instruments that (due to the various chanters used and other aspects of their design) can handle complex, fast-moving melodies; intensely analogue devices that, due to their precision and lack of sonic decay, can feel almost electronic in nature. Capable of simultaneously evoking melancholy and spritely joy, one on its own, played well, can fill a whole room with sound almost to the point of oppression. Unsurprisingly for a musician who’s been winning awards since she was a teen, Chaimbeul is an exceptional player of the smallpipes and from the opening blast of “Pililiù: The Call of the Redshank” these 35 minutes practically put on a clinic on why any listener might want to get to know them.
Not that Chaimbeul is strictly solo; after Canadian saxophone dynamo Colin Stetson reached out to her about a documentary soundtrack, the two of them wound of working together on six of the nine tracks here. If you’ve never previously considered the way sax and bagpipe might sound like each other, or take on similar roles, or complement each other, their completely natural fit here might take you aback. Stetson fans are well aware of the head of steam he can build up, but Chaimbeul’s no slouch either; a track like “Tha Fonn Gun Bhi Trom: I Am Disposed of Mirth” already feels delirious before you notice Stetson’s whirling flutters unspooling in the background. Even when their roles diverge more, like the impossible to miss saxophone tessellations towards the end of “’S Mi Gabhail an Rathaid: I Take the Road,” they feel like kindred spirits.
The most notable element aside from Chaimbeul’s pipes and Stetson’s sax is her voice, singing in Gaelic. It only shows up a few times but it’s an arresting presence whenever it does. Maybe if you speak the language it turns out she’s singing about something more mundane, but based on the song titles here and the incantatory, almost vatic feeling those passages bring to the rest of the music it’s hard not to feel like there’s something of deep significance being passed on. Like the rest of Carry Them With Us, it's intensely striking.
