If it’s not too obvious a point to make, folk music exists across temporal and geographical distance, and is no respecter of boundaries. There is a distinct variety of folk music concerned with displacement that feeds particularly voraciously on distance, a variety that we might call the ‘transatlantic weird.’ Songs move with people, but they also move between people, and over time, this leads to change. At times, the change is just enough to render a song uncanny: we recognise it and are shocked by its difference in the same beat. Some of these songs, the same but different, exist in two places at once, thousands of miles apart. An experimental folk musician in London might be playing an Appalachian ballad, just as a free-folk band in Portland, Oregon, plays the same song, but in the style of—and learned from—a 1970s folk-rock band from the UK. The ‘weird’ element occurs somewhere in between these renderings, in the listener.
Weirs, a band based in Hillsborough, North Carolina, seem to understand this relationship innately. They use elements of drone and DIY recording techniques in order to make their songs distant from themselves. They record songs that exist in the folk tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, and their name is one letter away from ‘weird.’ Here, on their second album Diamond Grove, we find versions of Lord Randall and Lord Bateman, both in dramatic, drone-laden and drawn-out states. The first is bleak with the resignation of Oliver Child-Lanning’s voice and darkened by strings that seem stretched to breaking point before receding into calm: the song has a breath-like structure, rising and falling in a series of deep draughts. The second is a twenty-plus minute excursion into a kind of old-time dream-space, with mysterious, clattering background noises, free-folk dynamics and powerful vocals. Imagine if Milkweed played their songs at the pace of Bohren & der Club of Gore and you might be getting close.
But Child-Lanning and his loose collective are more than one-trick drone-ponies. Diamond Grove’s opening song – the spiritual I Want to Die Easy – sees Weirs engage in a literal way with the ideas of detachment, distance and delay. A lyric of almost brutal closeness is recorded in the echoing confines of an old grain silo, redoubling and thickening, and always a step away from the listener. The melody of Everlasting – beautiful, slow and tender – plays out over barely-grasped snatches of voice, while the grim murder ballad Edward proves a spectacular vehicle for Child-Lanning’s singing, even as the drones build and the scrapes and squalls of fiddle threaten to overwhelm it.
The biggest surprises, though, come in (A Still, Small Voice) and Doxology (I). The former is a deconstructed hymn enlivened by scatter of external noise, while the latter embraces a wealth of homemade electronics, focused on a kind of DIY version of autotune. It functions as a comment on the ephemeral nature of all technology (and the tension created when that ephemerality comes into contact with the apparent timelessness of folk song); this in turn brings up deeper meanings related to uncanny aesthetics and atavistic urges.
There are a lot of ideas to unpack in Weirs’ music, but there is also a lot of music too. Fiddles screech and swirl, a pump organ sighs and groans. Child-Lanning’s dulcimer is indebted to Jean Ritchie, and at points, an autoharp conjures the spirit of Maybelle Carter. A total of ten musicians contribute, playing dozens of instruments, and then there are the electronics, the decayed tape loops, the environmental recordings. The individual musical strokes are loose and expressionistic, but the whole is impressively curated. Diamond Grove is hypnotic, bucolic, meditative, jarring, melancholic, jubilant: an exceptional musical document.
Diamond Grove (October 3rd, 2025) Dear Life
Bandcamp: https://weirs-nc.bandcamp.com/album/diamond-grove-2