The Caucasus folk traditions are overdue for a comeback, from lezginka dancing to polyphonic singing. Zulal Armenian A Cappella Trio is a great ambassador, certainly in their new recording By the Shepherd's Clock. The singing is strong and sensitively recorded, neither unedited nor unrecognizeable. The blend is good, with the two higher voices bringing particulaly nice unisons and canons. And the tunes feel timeless, with the cross-cultural echoes that the best folk music packs in.

From lilting dances to yearning melodies, the folk song choices here have enough contrast to hold their own in the lineup. It makes sense that the music of Armenia, right in the middle of the Silk Road, would incorporate a plethora of European and Asian influences. Zoulo sounds Spanish/Iberian to my ears. Meanwhile, Goghpa Yayli has a modern drone and a pitched percussion remniscent of Sheila Chandra underpinning its traditional central European dance tune. The piece is repetitive but gets extra energy from the way the group shifts textures and gives shape to the track.

I don't speak a word of Armenian, but these songs have plenty to say for themselves. Zinch oo Zinch, Gomidas tugs at my heartstrings: it feels like an entreaty asking someone to come to the party, come out to dance, come on home. Lovely unisons give way to a canon effect in the arrangement. It reminds me of Galant tu perds ton temps, the all-female supergroup from Quebec. Later on we get Hink Edz, perhaps a lullaby or traveling song, and another dance in Dal Dala. Noubar brings the rhythmic sound of the sea or a weaver's shuttle, music for a child to fall asleep to while her elders worked.

Janiman has one of the more ambitious arrangements and story arcs. To me the intro sounds like a 19th-century English arrangement of a central European folk song, while the uptempo section reminds me of Irish-Gaelic lilting, specifically Altan's iconic arrangement of the similarly named Dulaman. You can hear the mountain ranges in between, but also the similarities. Antsrevn Yegav also has Celtic overtones to my ears—the ornamentation specifically reminds me of the magnificent Mary Jane Lamond from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. I offer these comparisons as anchor points, not official musicology. This folk music from Armenia speaks to the heart.

Zulal's By the Shepherd's Clock is a spell of time travel, taking listeners into the mists of Armenian folk music. The language and life stories may seem foreign, but the motivations and passions of the songs' heroes and heroines resonate as timeless: to love beauty, to fear loss, to offer a ring, to dance up a storm together. We may not be Shepherds, nor wandering royalty, but we know love and longing. Let the English translations guide your listening like a film's subtitles. Or just take the journey blind and experience the emotions so ably expressed in these ten tracks, perhaps even following by instinct and sympathetic resonance. Either choice leads down profoundly beautiful paths.

Teni Apelian, Anaïs Alexandra Tekerian and Yeraz Markarian compose the New York-based Armenian women's trio, Zulal. Celebrating an incredible twenty years together with four albums on offer, scores of original arrangements and a performance schedule that boasts stops at the Kennedy Center, New York's City Hall and Carnegie Hall, Zulal has never been more unified.

Singing exposed without multi-tracking or studio effects, the group's voices are a perfect, unified blend, expressing nuance and intimacy in ways untouchable by lesser ensembles. Breathy and filled with seemingly infinite micro-phrasings, Zulal's music is a beautifully woven tapestry: sorrowful, joyful, aching, and celebratory. From the gentle boldness of the opening chords in Janiman inspired by the Largo section of Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony, which lead us to a heartbreaking dance that fades away all too soon, to the delicate but energized phrasing in tracks like Hink Edz and Dal Dala, Zulal is mesmerizing.

Preserving, arranging and interpreting the music and stories of Armenian folk music, the trio breaks new ground on Zoulo by incorporating Armenian oral tradition into the track itself. Berjouhi Yessaian, a member's aunt, taught this traditional melody to the group in a 2010 recording, and we hear her voice sharing this melody, and then the voices of 2023's Zulal taking the torch and carrying it onward. They repeat and harmonize the melody, setting a priceless gem to shine brightly for future generations. Process becomes part and parcel: we hear both source and invention.

The bombast, melodrama, and artifice of contemporary music is entirely and blissfully absent from By the Shepherd's Clock. The hypnotically attractive lure of Zulal lies in the smallest of details; they are music under a macro lens, revealing the invisible world in our midst, a world of familiar emotions and deep connection.

If you've come to the RARB site and opened a review for an album of a cappella in Armenian, perhaps you're just curious, or thorough, but I'm going to assume you clearly already have an interest in the material.

In point of fact, if you have direct interest in the material, you likely have more familiarity with, knowledge of, and/or understanding of the material than any of the reviewers whose opinions you are reading here. Certainly, this reviewer.

Indeed, while we at RARB do not infrequently have the privilege to listen to wonderful a cappella from across the globe, there is an inherent challenge when not only is the music presented in a foreign language, but when the material in question is an album of (adapted) traditional/folk music — something I do actually enjoy (from many countries in many languages) in limited doses — where the typical format is verse-chorus-verse-chorus. These are often simple, plaintive melodies and if presented faithfully, without drastic re-harmonization or re-interpretation, there can be a sameness and a repetitiveness to the material. It can be novel and intriguing, and sometimes even fun — as a one-off in a concert, or as a few-song cycle within a larger program. But an entire album in one sitting — again, absent a direct connection to the original work and/or the language — can be a bit of a struggle.

All of the above comes into play in trying to assign numerical scores to Zulal's By the Shepherd's Clock. The three singers sing beautifully, almost unfailingly in tune, and when they need to blend, they blend excellently (and when they need to sing contrapuntally, as they often do, they do that wonderfully as well). There are a few moments where the balance between them might be slightly off, occasionally swallowing the soloist a bit, but for an album with minimal noticeable post-production work, that's forgivable and certainly the exception rather than the rule.

What's less simple is how to grade the work both a) in the context of the larger world of a cappella and b) against itself.

Against the body of a cappella generally, I would hesitate to call any of this work "average". I daresay many larger groups could never have made this music as Zulal does, let alone with just three singers. At the same time, is it "excellent"? Tough to say that as well. This is solid work but not overly inventive or varied. And while the album/the group's website does provide brief notes on each selection that at least paints a picture of what is being sung, those themes are not especially varied either — mostly short sketches of aspirational love, lost love, depictions of charming bucolic scenes in the Armenian countryside, and/or a specific character in that countryside community.

And even within the context provided, yes, I enjoy Nare and Janiman more than the other selections offered here, but does that mean they are "better" qualitatively/numerically? Probably not. Truth be told, but for certain sections of certain songs — the vp of Laz Bar, Palu, the frenetic uptempo passage in Hink Edz, the seemingly more contemporary/jazzy harmony in the first half of Janiman — many of the songs run together not just in the general tenor of their subject matter but also in their relaxed, lilting, mid-tempo delivery, and I begin to find them difficult to distinguish in my memory without going back and listening again.

The solid "4"s across the board in my track scoring are a reflection of both of the above realities (as I see them).

All of which is to say that if you do indeed fall into the category of person who feels an inherent connection to these melodies and words, you will likely find tremendous enjoyment in By the Shepherd's Clock. And if you don't, you will likely admire from afar but not re-visit more than a track or two (if any) anytime soon.