Devin Hoff – Voices From the Empty Moor (Songs of Anne Briggs)
Kill Rock Stars – 12 November 2021
For a few years now, Devin Hoff has been the go-to guy for experimental indie acts looking for a double bassist with enough individuality and flair to stamp his own inimitable sound on a recording session, so much so that you can forget that he is a solo performer with a clutch of excellent albums behind him. He is also a big fan of British folk icon Anne Briggs, and his latest project pays tribute to her songs and those she helped to popularise. This being Hoff, it’s not so much a covers album as a series of dramatic but somehow faithful rearrangements.
Hoff calls in a few favours and assembles a stellar cast of like-minded Briggs fans, including Julia Holter and Shannon Lay, both of whom he has worked extensively with before. Sharon Van Etten, with whom Hoff recorded a Tiny Desk Concert earlier this year, takes on Briggs’s original Go Your Way with impressive results. Blackwaterside, the song that helped bring Bert Jansch to worldwide recognition (and, more controversially, was ripped off by Jimmy Page), begins as a skitter of plucked bass over a low drone before Cairo Gang singer Emmett Kelly’s vocals anchor the song in a decidedly American folk tradition.
Anne Briggs was that rare thing – a truly great singer who was equally adept as songwriter and interpreter, and both sides are well represented here, albeit with a distinct weighting towards the traditional material. Maa Bonny Lad, featuring Howard Wiley, takes one of Briggs’s simplest, most beautiful a capella performances and turns it into an exploratory bass-and-sax instrumental at the intersection of folk and wild jazz. It’s a revelatory experience. Oud player Alejandro Farha joins Hoff on The Snow It Melts The Soonest/My Bonny Boy, taking the simple melody in darker and more complex directions, while Willie O’ Winsbury sees Jim White – still one of the best drummers on the circuit – add his famously expressive rhythmic soundworld to Hoff’s bass and guitar.
The highlights are perhaps the contributions from Holter and Lay. Lay gives a stripped-down rendition of Living By The Water. Lay’s own recent album is one of the year’s best releases, and this song sits alongside that record perfectly: deceptively slight, slightly uncanny. Holter sings Let No Man Steal Your Thyme. The detached, somewhat mannered nature of her voice is curiously suited to this variety of folk music where shades of darkness often hide behind a seemingly innocent veneer, and Hoff exploits this brilliantly with a dark, impressionistic backdrop of haunted bass notes and ominous drones.
Despite the varied styles of his collaborators, Hoff’s own playing is strong enough to give the album a coherence, and nowhere is this better exemplified than in its opening and closing pieces, both of which are solo bass arrangements. She Moved Through The Fair picks out an unaccompanied melody to stark and startling effect and is a strong advertisement for the sheer versatility of the double bass in the right hands. The minimal arrangement of brief closer The Lowlands allows the distinctive buzz and hum of the instrument to filter through, a timeless sound, almost non-musical in its rich physicality, presented in a way that is sophisticated and modern.
That sort of tension might be the key to Voices From The Empty Moor’s success: it is experimental but accessible, an album that looks backwards for inspiration but is entirely contemporary in feel.
Voices From the Empty Moor is out now on Kill Rock Stars.
Read our Interview with Anne Briggs here.