The Milk Carton Kids - Ash and Clay (12/04/2013)
Walk into any trendy café these days and after you tune out the overbearing coffee grinder and clangs of saucers and cups, chances are there will be some smooth melodic music playing in the background. The Ash & Clay by The Milk Carton Kids is exactly one of those albums. With their melodic guitar strums and attentive lyrics they make easy listening somehow even easier.
Californian duo Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan have come back since their 2011 release, Prologue, with what is arguably their most folk-driven yet beautifully simple album ever. In-between albums, they’ve spent a lot of time on the road performing alongside such legends as the Punch Brothers, Old Crow Medicine Show and K.D. Lang. They’ve experienced a lot in the past couple years and their knowledge shines through in The Ash & Clay.
Throughout the album it gently oscillates between slow harmonic tracks, which can be seen in Snake Eyes and Years Gone By, and their upbeat hoedown infused tracks like Honey, Honey and Heaven. In just 42 minutes Pattengale and Ryan take you on a journey of love, lust and utter despair, which you come out of feeling both broken and enlightened.
The album opens with Hope of a lifetime and Pattengale’s fluid guitar picking, which is soon matched when Ryan’s voice swings in. One of their happier songs, Hope of a Lifetime, lifts the audience spirits and creates a great platform for the next 11 songs.
The Milk Carton Kids are often praised on the quality of their song lyrics and there is no better showcase of this than their title track, The Ash & Clay. As soon as the lyrics kick in with, “The swing sets are empty like dirt turned the dark of the night”, you instantly get the feeling it’s going to be an amazing song. Luckily, The Ash & Clay continues on from where it started and delivers some brilliant lines that will stick with you well after the last chord.
The Ash & Clay isn’t alone in its brilliance, and Promised Land easily surpasses it and becomes the standout track of the album. With a simplistic rhythm the lyrics become the focus of the track and deservedly so. Although the lyrics are also quite simple, they conjure a story of love and loss with its poetic language, “I’m gonna make you cry / you won’t remember when / I won’t remember why”. Coincidentally, their best track also seems to be the most mainstream.
Overall The Ash & Clay serves as an ode to the days where all you needed was a guitar and your voice, but also as an example of what’s missing in today’s industry. It’s obvious that people are quickly catching on to the simplistic phenomenon of the Milk Carton Kids, and as a result Hollywood has come knocking on their door. Not only have they had three songs featured in the film Promised Land but they also managed to get Amanda Seyfried to star in one of their film clips. This is clearly just the beginning of bigger and better things for the duo and at just two albums in there’s bound to be a lot of it.
Amanda Sherring
Californian duo Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan have come back since their 2011 release, Prologue, with what is arguably their most folk-driven yet beautifully simple album ever. In-between albums, they’ve spent a lot of time on the road performing alongside such legends as the Punch Brothers, Old Crow Medicine Show and K.D. Lang. They’ve experienced a lot in the past couple years and their knowledge shines through in The Ash & Clay.
Throughout the album it gently oscillates between slow harmonic tracks, which can be seen in Snake Eyes and Years Gone By, and their upbeat hoedown infused tracks like Honey, Honey and Heaven. In just 42 minutes Pattengale and Ryan take you on a journey of love, lust and utter despair, which you come out of feeling both broken and enlightened.
The album opens with Hope of a lifetime and Pattengale’s fluid guitar picking, which is soon matched when Ryan’s voice swings in. One of their happier songs, Hope of a Lifetime, lifts the audience spirits and creates a great platform for the next 11 songs.
The Milk Carton Kids are often praised on the quality of their song lyrics and there is no better showcase of this than their title track, The Ash & Clay. As soon as the lyrics kick in with, “The swing sets are empty like dirt turned the dark of the night”, you instantly get the feeling it’s going to be an amazing song. Luckily, The Ash & Clay continues on from where it started and delivers some brilliant lines that will stick with you well after the last chord.
The Ash & Clay isn’t alone in its brilliance, and Promised Land easily surpasses it and becomes the standout track of the album. With a simplistic rhythm the lyrics become the focus of the track and deservedly so. Although the lyrics are also quite simple, they conjure a story of love and loss with its poetic language, “I’m gonna make you cry / you won’t remember when / I won’t remember why”. Coincidentally, their best track also seems to be the most mainstream.
Overall The Ash & Clay serves as an ode to the days where all you needed was a guitar and your voice, but also as an example of what’s missing in today’s industry. It’s obvious that people are quickly catching on to the simplistic phenomenon of the Milk Carton Kids, and as a result Hollywood has come knocking on their door. Not only have they had three songs featured in the film Promised Land but they also managed to get Amanda Seyfried to star in one of their film clips. This is clearly just the beginning of bigger and better things for the duo and at just two albums in there’s bound to be a lot of it.
Amanda Sherring