(Kill Rock Stars)
The experimentally minded bassist and star guests including Sharon Van Etten and Julia Holter create these unusual reimaginings, though the vocals don’t always suit Briggs’s songs
Motivated by Bikini Kill to pursue a musical career in the 1990s, bass player Devin Hoff has spent the past decade inspired by another radical artist, the folk singer and songwriter Anne Briggs. In the 60s and 70s, Briggs revived English, Scottish and Traveller songs and wrote her own lovely, twisted compositions before retiring to rural Scotland. Hoff is a long-term experimentalist and collaborator who has worked with Yoko Ono, Cibo Matto and Sharon Van Etten – the last of whom is one of several stellar guests on this unusual set of reimaginings of Briggs’s work.
Julia Holter and drummer Jim White appear too, but Hoff’s bass should command the most attention. It sets the scene majestically on opening track She Moved Through the Fair: layers of long, low, scraped notes creating shuddering, rumbling textures, suggesting a door to the underworld opening up (and perhaps the arrival of “the dead love” in Briggs’s version of the ballad). It’s similarly commanding on The Lowlands and Maa Bonny Lad (on which the saxophonist Howard Wiley provides fractious but fascinating accompaniment) but best on The Snow It Melts the Soonest/My Bonny Boy: simple and beautiful. Accompanied by oud player Alejandro Farha, Hoff unfurls the tunes in expansive new ways.
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