North Carolina experimental folk collective Weirs unveil a live video for “Lord Bateman,” the towering centrepiece of their album Diamond Grove. The video was filmed at their album release show at the 5th annual FEAST in Orange County, North Carolina, with accompanying shadow puppetry; the visual arrives as the band kicks off their tour tonight in Washington, DC, with subsequent dates across the East Coast (dates below).
Remarking on the video, band organiser Oliver Child-Lanning shares: “Each year in the fall, friends and I host Feast, a harvest meal and music event that spans the first weekend of October. This year, to mark the release of Weirs’ new album Diamond Grove, we opened Saturday night by playing through ‘Lord Bateman’ from the album in its entirety, with shadow puppets by my sister Violet and other friends and family. Everyone gathered around the glowing puppet theater as we played and sang, accompanied by insects and the fall breeze.”
In his review of Diamond Grove, Thomas Blake concludes: “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.”
The accompanying notes for the track share:
Also known as “Lord Beichan”, this centuries-old ballad about love’s perseverance across space and time has long circulated through the English-speaking world, though its exact origins remain a debate. Weirs’s version, first worked up while on tour with Magic Tuber Stringband in 2022, anchors Diamond Grove as its beating heart.
Their take on what American folk singer, songwriter, and Appalachian dulcimer player Jean Ritchie called a “big ballad,” traditionally sung when the chores were done and the night’s dancing had ended, channels the 18th-century tale of a captured adventurer that English singer-songwriter Nic Jones once likened to an Errol Flynn film. Like many great and often a cappella renditions, this “Lord Bateman” is voice-forward, foregrounding the gather-round-children pull of yarn spinning, while an immense drone newly transubstantiates the narrative into a ceaseless body of elemental forces—a collective, eye-blurring murmur of strings that expands the canon of Ritchie and June Tabor as much as Pelt’s Ayahuasca or Henry Flynt’s Hillbilly Tape Music.
Shows
December 8 @ Rhizome – Washington, DC
December 9 @ The Perch – Philadelphia, PA
December 10 @ Clatter Cafe – Frostburg, MD
December 11 @ Newport Comm. Ctr – Newport, VA
December 12 @ Static Age – Asheville, NC
December 13 @ Flicker Theater – Athens, GA