Post Description

01 - Deer People
02 - Old Moon
03 - Arbegen
04 - Our Captain Cried All Hands
05 - And We Are Going
06 - Down The Road
07 - Solstice
08 - The Shadow Walks Behind You
09 - Bread And Water
10 - Bonefolder
11 - BoyMoon
12 - Day Into Night
13 - Deer People Reprise

Recorded in a Virginia mountain town named Rural Retreat, the debut from this quartet of fringe-folk veterans beautifully articulates the weirdness and magic of life outside of the city.
F-150s and Fox News, Christians and country music, ammunition and American flags: These are defining symbols of modern life in the rural United States, a landscape often assumed to be so stubborn and insular that liberal pundits write it off as a lost cause. That stereotype overlooks not only an incoming tide of militantly progressive country folks but also the sort of longstanding wonder that can emerge from life outside of the city. This is the ever-weird America that fascinated Harry Smith and the Lomax lineage, after all, a place so attuned to the skies and the seasons, and so isolated from trends, that it can produce an esoteric entertainment that feels worlds apart from its city kin. Its so-called “outsider art” transmogrifies life’s joys and impositions into something transcendent.
That practical magic is the lifeblood of Doran, a spectacular new quartet composed of four musicians long situated on the fringes of American folk, all of them singers and multi-instrumentalists with a shared fondness for puppet shows and far-flung folk myths. Doran are a pair of pairs: Channing Showalter and Annie Schermer are known as West of Roan, a group whose sublime and haunted songs speak to time split between North Carolina’s Blue Ridge and Washington’s Cascades. Elizabeth LaPrelle, meanwhile, earned attention with Anna & Elizabeth, a transgressive outfit responsible for one of the most transfixing albums of the past decade. Her husband, Brian Dolphin, is a songwriter and ethnomusicologist steeped in the traditional sounds of the Ukraine and U.S. They channel all this into their self-titled debut.
In the winter of 2019, the two duos rendezvoused in the tiny Virginia mountain town where LaPrelle and Dolphin lived until recently. They entertained themselves in the ways that life in a place named Rural Retreat might suggest—cavorting in fallen leaves, stewing broth for hours, and escaping to an attic to record 13 songs that capture the strange majesty of lives so tied to nature that the occult and the ordinary overlap. Where Bonny Light Horseman subtly reimagined very old songs for now, Doran’s originals deny that the march of time actually exists. Their debut lands like a lost treasure salvaged from the vaults of the Watersons in the ’70s or Devendra Banhart and his Gnomonsong cohort three decades later. Sweet, sad, and often surreal, Doran is content to be out of place, a bounty stolen from the deepest woods.


Wachtwoord: TTwsMz