Kacy & Clayton: Carrying On (Vinyl LP)

The music Kacy & Clayton make is inextricable from where they grew up. The second cousins sing about the kind of people you’d find in Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan (population very few). The hills, barns, and remoteness of the area are in these songs, with a bittersweet acknowledgement that this music has taken them far from home.

Their sound is equal parts homespun, coming from a family and community where playing music is an ever present part of social gatherings, and the rare country, blues, and English folk rock they obsess over and collect. It’s an arresting amalgamation of psychedelic folk, English folk revival and the ancestral music of Southern Appalachia.

For Carrying On, Clayton cites as influences: Bobbie Gentry’s Delta Sweete, Hoyt Axton’s My Griffin Is Gone, Cajun fiddle music, and the steel guitar of Ralph Mooney, who played on many of the records that defined the Bakersfield country music scene of the 1950s. Sixties psych has also woven its way into these new songs; Kacy enjoys telling people that they live 250km from the mental hospital that coined the term “psychedelic.”

Of Carrying On, Jeff Tweedy said "When I first heard Kacy and Clayton, I was struck by how much detail and nuance they had absorbed from what sounded like a large swath of my record collection. When I told them that they were as good as the artists they were drawing from, I’m not sure they believed me. On this record I don’t hear those influences as much as I hear them taking the things they love so intimately and telling their own story. I think they’re a truly great band".

1. The Forty - Ninth Parallel
2. Carrying On
3. High Holiday
4. In a Time of Doubt
5. Intervention
6. Mom and Dad’s Waltz #2
7. Providence Place
8. The South Saskatchewan River
9. Spare Me over One More Year
10. That Sweet Orchestra Sound