Changing Faces “The air in the house is different now,” says Ryan Boldt, the creative force behind The Deep Dark Woods. Boldt’s house is now full of pets, plants, and happiness. It’s a house by the ocean, far from the rural prairie landscapes of his childhood, a defining feature of The Deep Dark Woods’ sound and lyrics. The house is also an emotional dwelling, an inner place for processing upheaval, finding new direction, and making peace with the past. On Changing Faces, The Deep Dark Woods’ sixth album, Boldt works through the complications, unique to him and recognizable to many, of leaving one place for the next. You will be surprised by how gradual yet complete a turn The Deep Dark Woods have made from a cabin cozy jam band to a pan-Atlantic folk revivalist collective on Changing Faces. Boldt’s delicate melodies and metallic-stringed bite rattle centuries-old folkloric ghosts and personal demons alike. The Deep Dark Woods, a band with few fixed members, is a vessel for Boldt, keyboard wonder Geoff Hilhorst, and frequent collaborators like Kacy & Clayton and Evan Cheadle, among others, to find their own vocabulary for translating traditional folk forms – Irish waltzes, broadside ballads, ominous lullabies – to contemporary electric terms.
