Kacy & Clayton – Carrying On
New West – 4 October 2019
Cousins from Saskatchewan, Kacy Anderson and Clayton Linthicum made their first appearance on Folk Radio UK in 2015 with a review of their third album Strange Country. I became familiar with them via their third album, 2017’s Jeff Tweedy-produced The Siren’s Song, and he returns to twiddle the knobs again for their latest release Carrying On. In the interim, Clayton’s grown a moustache but pretty much everything else remains the same in their folk-roots world, she handling the bulk of the vocals with her soaring and sweet cocktail of Judy Collins and Sylvia Tyson, he on guitar and keys. Things kick off with The Forty-Ninth Parallel, a lyric about a woman from a respected country family regretting that she married for love rather than money, becoming a working man’s bride and ending up with nothing to her name.
Clayton takes to the piano for the slow shuffled and no less downbeat title track which, with a morbid fear of mortality, dwells on how “We’re all dying together” and that “in an instant, it all could be gone” and like “ the sand in the ashtray, we’ll be tossed away” so we should “hold every minute, like it’s your last dime”.
You’d think something called High Holiday might take on a slightly less gloomy aspect, but no, a spare, bluesy slow chug it has Clayton singing of empty streets full of sorrow all the shops closed and everyone staying indoors because of the bitter winter weather, a sort of collective misery underscored by Charlie McCoy’s bass harmonica.
Although the setting’s country with its twangy guitar, there’s also a certain 60s soul-pop feel (A Lover’s Concerto to be precise, although Walk Right In hovers too) to In A Time of Doubt, Kacy back on vocals for a post-break-up depression number “here the only people that I see/Is the doctor, my Mother, and Dad” as she sings how “I drank your poison now I’m going back where the water is pure”, so still not exactly all sunshine and smiles.
Continuing along the mental breakdown path but again illuminated with the light of salvation, Mike Silverman’s military beat drums carry along Intervention, a number that Lee Hazelwood might have penned for Nancy, at least until it suddenly briefly breaks into slow Patsy Cline honky tonk waltz passages where the admission “it’s so hard to find the pleasure in the simple things I do” gives way to ditching the medication because “I’ve been healed by an angel from within an earthly man”.
Picking up on the tempo and featuring Clayton on resonator guitar with sometime Tweedy collaborator Sima Cunningham adding vocals, it’s followed by the dreamily sung Mom and Dad’s Waltz, a poignant song of compassion for a psychologically damaged troubled soul, who, the unplanned child of “a welfare Mom, and a farewell Dad”, for all the best intentions, is passed around to be cared for by different relatives, “Waking up and never knowing/To which crib they will be going” so that “Never knowing how it feels to stay/When he learns to walk, he’ll walk away”.
Dislocation and endings are there too with the equally sad, midtempo and warblingly sung Providence Place, a sketch of encroaching Alzheimer’s (“I’ve known you for ages/But I can’t recall your name”) as one half of a long musical partnership has to hang up their instruments as they’re moved to a retirement home to be cared for.
The thread continues with Clayton singing lead on the pensive, folksy blues The South Saskatchewan River, here striking an environmentalist note as he describes how, “Where the Sage and Sharp-tailed Grouses/Used to look for spouses/There’s a row of new-made houses going up for sale”, the wildlife it used to harbour dispossessed.
It’s back then to more thoughts of mortality from Kacy with the tremulously sung slow waltzing Spare Me Over One More Year of how “Death comes every evening/Crying at my door” a number laced with intimations of suicide as she sings “I never leave without a penknife/In my pocket or my hand/For if I’m taken from this brief life/It will not be from his hands”.
After all this, it’s a relief when the album ends with the literal and metaphorical melting of the snows and the return of warmth with the celebratory traditional folk styled arms-linked sway-along of That Sweet Orchestra Sound as, to Clayton’s ringing guitar and Silverman’s march beat, as, in a number referencing and dedicated to the memory of local pickers such As Bud Romanski, Bob McGlynn and Lonnie Harden, “People come down/Down from the hills/Down to the flatlands below” heading into town to hear the band strike up and dance the night away, a parting grace blessing that “May the Lord bless and keep you till we meet again/Once more in the fall of the year”.
Basically, taking its cue from the changing seasons, it’s an album about trials and tribulations and, as per the title, making it through the hard times, but if not, then accepting the path, until the clouds break and the sun comes through once more, a reassurance that “it’s a long messy road into town/But nothing can stop us for we’re on our way”.
Pre-Order Carrying on via Amazon