The recording project of Philadelphia’s Kris Leigh, Delv is born of the folk tradition, utilising finger-picked guitar and hushed vocals as the core of the songs. However, wishing to push past the genre conventions, Leigh casts the net wider, adding electronic and ambient elements to flesh out her soundscapes, filling the spaces between her words with a richly melancholic texture. The result is something quietly powerful, and each track becomes its own world, complete with space and warmth and sadness.
This month saw the release of the debut Delv album, Waning. Following the above formula, the record highlights Leigh’s careful hand when composing. Many an artist has added synths to their folk music and inadvertently buried the human core, but every additional element in Delv’s arrangements work together to accentuate the emotions present in the vocals. Opener ‘Wildfire’ is a great example, a reserved track of wistful rhythms, the barely-there synths washing behind Leigh’s gentle vocals. The result is a natural kind of emotion, the sensation of viewing a landscape and finding some energy beneath the surface—the triangulated point of beauty and loss and latent violence that lies within the natural world.
Single ‘Two Shadows’ is “a song about two lost people finding one another,” Leigh explains. “They wander together with no destination. But because they have each other, the experience of being lost is magical.” With the vocals echoing through a misty late-night quiet, the song is something of a slow epiphany. What if the present was the destination all along? What if there is nothing better or more fulfilling ahead of the the moment?
Coloured by the realisation, the track is wistful and sad, already mourning for the when the present is in hindsight, while also struggling against this loss in the hope that change can be held at bay. “Our love is like two shadows dancing under street lights,” Leigh sings. “Wandering through the night to nowhere. And I hope we never get there.”
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Some tracks, such as ‘Bottom Line’, push further into electronic influences, adding a beat to certain sections and lending an immediacy that juxtaposes well with the drifting melodies. Others opt for stark simplicity while some blur the distinction. ‘Back of My Hands,’ with its steady rise from placid restraint to affirming crescendo, is firmly in this latter camp. Stirring from near silence, there’s an energy embedded deep within the track that shows itself in small flashes, a hard seam of determination that’s sometimes stumbled upon during close introspection.
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The description could stand for Waning as a whole, an album of tenderness and vulnerability that nonetheless finds strength in running its fingers along its bruises. There can be great meaning in quiet, a depth of understanding to be found slowly and alone. Living up to its name, Delv pushes down into this space, taking you by the hand so that you too might come to know its contours.
Waning is out now and available from the Delv Bandcamp page.
