The Deep Dark Woods: Changing Faces

The Deep Dark Woods – Changing Faces

Six Shooter Records – 14 May 2021

As a thrift store addict, I pay frequent visits to my local branches of the Sally Ann, where used CDs now sell for the princely sum of 50c (around 30p). It can be feast or famine, but over time I’ve picked up a great many gems, recently including a wonderful career overview of The Dillards called There is a Time. The liner notes are courtesy of eminent roots music authority Dr. Neil V. Rosenberg, who of The Dillards’ music says:

“These songs tell of the power in things old, organic and rural, to bring sanity and meaning to modern, plastic, urban life.”

I feel that Rosenberg’s succinct statement in respect of the Missourian bluegrass legends is also perfectly applicable to the increasingly arcadian and contemplative material by one of Canada’s finest purveyors of stately folk-rock, The Deep Dark Woods.

I’ve been onboard with roots scholar Ryan Boldt’s beautiful band since their second album, 2007’s Hang Me, Oh Hang Me, and hopelessly smitten since first hearing The Birds On the Bridge, an exquisite, delicate highlight of 2009’s sublime follow-up, Winter Hours. Three further albums (and Boldt’s sparse 2014 solo effort, Broadside Ballads) have been issued since, namely The Place I Left Behind (2011), Jubilee (2013), and 2017’s Yarrow. In reflection of the title of the first of those, and as evident within the lyrical content of this new album, Boldt has relocated considerable distances within Canada a couple of times during that span of time.

Under the band’s name last year saw the interim release of the all traditional, five-song Broadside Ballads Vol. II EP, but four years on from Yarrow comes Changing Faces, a collection of songs – including, interestingly, one entitled Yarrow – thematically exploring the emotions of separation, dislocation and, indeed, moving from one life situation to another. It’s not a cheery record, but as we’ve come to expect from Boldt and The Deep Dark Wood’s fluid personnel for the last fifteen years, while often lyrically downbeat the subject matters are consistently tempered by the songs being melodically pretty, achingly lovely, beautifully performed and produced, and – while maintaining lots of space – sonically lush. This new record checks all of the above boxes, so albeit with the odd tweak here and there Changing Faces should be considered business as usual.

I say ‘fluid’ personnel, but while Boldt as the songwriter and vocalist is the creative force and focus of The Deep Dark Woods he does lean on a small pool of regular contributors, some with parallel or extracurricular careers, and to that end he appears content for them to come and go as they please. If Boldt does have a right-hand person, though, it would be keyboard player Geoff Hilhorst (Barney Bentall & the Caribou Express/Satellite & the Harpoonist), who’s been present alongside Boldt for a decade now. Guitarist Clayton Linthicum joined for Jubilee, his Kacy & Clayton partner Kacy Lee Anderson for Yarrow, and both appear on Changing Faces. Following their collaboration on his own material Victoria’s excellent Evan Cheadle – whose new album I’ll be reviewing for FRUK next month – is also now an ‘official’ member of The Deep Dark Woods, if indeed anyone can be termed thus. Completing the line-up for this new album, chipping in on various tracks are drummer (since Yarrow) Mike Silverman (Kacy & Clayton/Old Reliable), multi-instrumentalist Simon Larochette (Olenka & the Autumn Lovers/Jenny Berkel), bassist Erik Nielsen (Frazey Ford/Jill Barber), double bass and strings specialist Colin Nealis (Jennah Barry/Aidan Knight/Andy Shauf), drummer Leon Power (Frazey Ford/Old Man’s Beard) and, embellishing two songs with chamber elegance, genre-straddling Russian violinist Maria Grigoryeva (Evan Cheadle) and cellist Lyudmila Kadyrbaeva (Evan Cheadle/Traun).

One of those two, Everything Reminds Me, was Changing Faces’ lead single and, considering the overall tone of the band’s catalogue to date, the haunting prairie-gothic ballad served to usher in a comfortingly familiar set of melancholy folk songs, occasionally flecked with a dash of psychedelia. There’s also the occasional stylistic surprise, such as the opening Treacherous Waters, a woozy doo-wop track, not a million miles removed from late-career Roy Orbison, but in the main, this is the reliably vintage, folk-embedded Boldt approach. It’s beautiful stuff that will certainly please existing fans and act as a worthy portal to the curious, but I do have one beef with Changing Faces in that, comprising just eight songs – all but two under four minutes – it’s only half-an-hour long/short. Yes, I know – quality over quantity and all that – but with music as emotionally engaging as that crafted by Boldt and friends, it’s a tad frustrating to suddenly have to snap back into modern, plastic, urban life having spent so little calming time somewhere old, organic, and rural.