In the slow, centerless world of Weirs, folk music is a memory that leaps from skull to skull, riding our dreams through time. The North Carolina collective gently dismantles old ballads, standards, and hymns and strews the parts across their three-legged workbench to see what they can find, like curious kids inventing a time machine while tinkering with a pocket watch. On their second album, Diamond Grove, simple tunes telescope into mind-bending epics; tape hiss and digital artifacting scrub the difference from past and present like some metamodern turpentine. It’s a hauntingly familiar signal from next door, leaking across a dimensional dam.
Centered on the fiddle-string tenor voice of Oliver Child-Lanning, a naturally resonant instrument that sounds a little Arthur Russell and a lot Sam Amidon, Weirs started as an early-lockdown online collaboration with Sluice’s Justin Morris, leading to the self-released debut Prepare to Meet God. The disembodiment fit that era, but on Diamond Grove, released by Dear Life Records, Weirs restore their communal idiom to its natural habitat. The music is vitally alive, crackling with mouth harps and junk percussion, turkey calls and Irish pipes—charismatic sounds that clamor above the richly sounding depths of the organs, strings, and vocals. It's an approach inspired by how we hear the sonic past, mediated and mutated by its long journey from pickin’ and grinnin’ sessions to wobbly shellac 78s to tape to CD and onward.
Diamond Grove is named for the former dairy farm in Virginia where Child-Lanning’s grandfather once lived, and where these nine musicians gathered to take advantage of site-specific features like the creak of farmhouse floors, the birds and insects of the fields, and the cylindrical echo of the silo, to say nothing of the accreted residue of personal history. Their long-form drones now take the shape of the space around them, with a palpable sense of a live band cooking deep in the music’s hyperreal folds. Field recordings of making dinner and doing chores are woven in, instantiating the broader human context that a folk song suggests, the performance unpartitioned from everyday life.
The ensemble includes Mipso’s Libby Rodenbough, who plays with Child-Lanning and Morris in Sluice and Fust, and Magic Tuber Stringband, a group that likewise creates warped ethnographic archives of other worlds. They dissolve a mass of fiddles, cellos, acoustic guitars, banjos, harmoniums, organs, and mutating shape note singing in a warm, radiant, brainwave-spiked singularity. “I Want to Die Easy,” based on the revered Smithsonian Folkways recording that Sam Amidon’s parents sang on, eases us into the continuum from traditional to turbulent: Conventional close harmonies, bathed in the silo’s long reverb, open out into lush gospel stacks and start poking into tart modernist corners. This alternate Appalachia’s roots include classical minimalism, the arcane edges of jazz, process art, and musique concrète.
“Everlasting” transforms a hymn into a locust swarm of electroacoustic psychedelia, while the MIDI-juiced “Doxology (I),” based on a Sacred Harp hymn, is a pitch-shifted tiny anthem in the line of Macha’s “Believe” cover, so sweet you wish there were more than 72 seconds of it. And there are two tour-de-force deconstructions of English ballads, “Lord Randall” and “Lord Bateman,” the latter heroically convolving for 20 prismatic minutes. It sounds like someone dragging a sack of wind chimes and rusty shovels in some weird, quantized cartoon reality, with strange liquid bends like shooting stars in a desert sky. Above all, Weirs are amazing at sticking to the moment like glue, letting it unfold, never rushing, reaping those rewards. In their deconstructed folk music, it’s not the stories that sweep me away; it’s the sound, and the sense of a hidden continuity between what seems a more coherently structured time and our scrambled, deracinated age. Weirs hit the mark with gorgeous idiosyncrasy, retrieving the tangible energy of the present from the illusions of the past.
