Diamond Grove Vinyl

Diamond Grove is nine tracks cut inside a two-hundred-year-old dairy farm house on the Meherrin River, a shifting North Carolina collective chasing down ancient ballads before they disappear entirely.

Weirs began as tape experiments Oliver Child-Lanning made alone under the name Pluviôse, then became a pandemic collaboration with Justin Morris on the genuinely strange debut Prepare to Meet God, songs recorded together while apart. This follow-up undoes that isolation on purpose. Nine musicians, including Morris and Libby Rodenbough from Sluice and three members of Magic Tuber Stringband, packed into the living and dining rooms of Child-Lanning's family farmhouse in September 2023, borrowed gear stitched together into an ad hoc signal chain, and recorded whatever the room and the moment gave them. The band operates without hierarchy and without a fixed lineup, closer to a standing invitation than a group in the conventional sense.

Lord Randall and Edward both draw from the same ancient British ballad tradition that's outlived centuries of interpretation, sung here with real reverence rather than academic distance. Lord Bateman stretches past twenty minutes, the record's clear centrepiece, patience treated as the whole point rather than an obstacle. I Want to Die Easy opens the album setting that unhurried, communal tone immediately.

Songcatchers rather than revivalists, standing beside these old songs rather than above them. Diamond Grove earns that distinction completely.

Tracklist

Side A

1. I Want To Die Easy
2. Lord Randall
3. Everlasting
4. Edward
5. Doxology I

Side B

1. (A Still, Small Voice)
2. Lord Bateman
3. Doxology II