REVIEW: Cat Clyde “Mud Blood Bone”

Cat Clyde Mud Blood Bone

Cat Clyde is back with her fourth album Mud Blood Bone, released March 13 on Concord Records. Questioning her Métis Indigenous identity and searching for love while affirming her independence, she explains: “I wrote these songs at the end of a big cycle. Love was not present in my life and I didn’t know where to find it or how to get it back. In the past, I felt like love chained me, controlled me, put me in a cage.”

The Canadian singer, who fell in love with the blues of Robert Johnson and Lead Belly when she was thirteen, delivers eleven tracks where bluesy, gritty guitars rub shoulders with the intimacy of indie and Americana sounds. Clyde wrote some of the songs in a trailer parked temporarily on a farm in Ontario, others on a narrowboat in England, and the rest in transit from one festival to another. “Constantly being on the move, having to navigate new environments, it forces me to be present and to confront my own feelings,” Clyde says. The approach occasionally evokes that of her friend Boy Golden (Liam Duncan), who collaborated on Mud Blood Bone.

Recorded at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia, and produced by Drew Vandenberg (Toro Y Moi, Faye Webster, S.G. Goodman), the album opens with “Where Is My Love,” where Clyde begins with a brief, almost yodel-like phrase before launching into a bouncy rhythm driven by raucous guitar fuzz that immediately makes you think of Link Wray, with whom she shares a Native heritage.

The second track is made of the same material, built on a nervous rockabilly beat whose frenetic rhythm emphasizes the lyrics of a woman seeking her place in a male-dominated world:

Cause it’s a man’s world
And you know I do my best
I can’t express my woman self
Without a shield across my chest

Cat Clyde also ventures onto the country-folk side with songs like “The Wild One,” “Dark Black,” “Night Eyes,” or “I Am Now,” where her voice takes on Gillian Welch-like intonations while the pedal steel and slide guitar of Matt Stoessel hover over these tunes.

Another great moment of the album is the cover of “My Love” by Marty Robbins, where Liam Duncan plays baritone guitar, giving the song a Western-like atmosphere before the sonic deflagration of the garage proto-punk track “Wanna Ride,” with its sixties Farfisa organ played by Erik Olson, supported by Charles LaMont Garner on drums and percussion and Robby Handley on bass, both present on most of the album.

The album ends with the intimate and atmospheric single “Another Time.”