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BIRDCLOUD
With The Savage Radley
Birdcloud is Jasmin Kaset and Makenzie Green, a pair who met in a place called Murfreesboro and who, since 2009, have used things like booze and sacrilege to make very modern country music. The duo write songs about what Sarah Palin deemed “the real America,” that unsung republic of countrified interstices stretching from coast to coast between cities. Kaset and Green’s America is a nation of indulgent reprobates and boastful imbeciles, laughing maniacs and horny high school dropouts— the desperate, absurd place we all inhabit in one way or another. The band’s music is the ravenous id of today’s commercial country sound, and in place of the pandering and polished banality of Nashville’s Music Row is a savagely honest depiction of “real Americans,” where a teenage evangelical designates her vagina (alone among her orifices) to Christ; a Desert Storm veteran dispenses ancient wisdom while driving drunk and toppling birdbaths in the suburbs; a coked up blackout drunk on a spree fellates a rodeo clown and tells her friend’s children that Santa doesn’t exist. These characters are characters in both senses of the word: 1) eccentrics with notoriously outsized personalities, as well as 2) complexly three-dimensional literary creations. The complicated sensation of listening to Birdcloud’s music—the simultaneous urge to laugh, vomit, and maybe break down and cry a little at how familiar and sad and true it all is—has won the band fans across the lower 48, stupefying and sickening audiences in equal measure.
Boasting a strong YouTube presence, Birdcloud’s un-unseeable videos resonate beyond the continental U.S., with a slew of fan-versions of songs available online as well as an odd amount of unauthorized re-releases of official Birdcloud videos with Russian subtitles. Birdcloud’s third and darkest EP was released in spring of 2014, and their follow-up record will launch in the summer of 2015.
Shaped and inspired by the American South, The Savage Radley is the brainchild of Shaina Goodman, a Kentucky-raised songwriter and Delta farmer's daughter whose music stomps, twangs, and bangs with all the power of her homeland.
"We're not throwback country," she says of her band, a group of pickers and pounders who add electricity, elasticity and grit to her songs. "We're not looking to be in the mainstream, either. We just want to fill our own corner of this Americana southern landscape."
Fueled by electric guitar, pedal steel, piano, and the percussion of former punk drummer and longtime band member Stephen Montgomery, the songs on the Savage Radley's debut album, Kudzu, tell the story of a modern-day South. This is raw, ragged, rock-influenced roots music, with Goodman singing about the land she knows — a land nearly forgotten, tucked away along the banks of the Mississippi River — in a voice caught halfway between a wail and a warble. Different in scope and sound from the music emanating from the nearby country capital of the world, Nashville TN, Kudzu was recorded in western Kentucky, with producer Skylar Wilson (Justin Townes Earle, Caitlin Rose, Andrew Combs) traveling from Tennessee to work with the band.
