“Time, time, time,” the Canadian singer-songwriter Cat Clyde chews the words before spitting them out with poignancy. Despite the transcendental quality of love, it cannot pause time—even when swaying in the arms of a lover with their breath filling you up like a lifeline. Time moves so fast that a memory is over before it has begun. Clyde would be a fool to fight time; still, it’s on her mind.
The leitmotif of Mud Blood Bone, Cat Clyde’s fourth studio album and first release with Concord Records, is, you guessed it, time, specifically, the unmooring from time, a non-linear and cyclical way of existence, which is an influence of her Métis heritage.
William Blake wrote that to hold a wild flower is to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, promulgated by the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in his 1955 poem, “Sunflower Sutra”. Clyde might be no Beat, no Willian Blakean, but she sings with her eyes to the earth. “We open like the wild rose flowers,” she intones in “Wild One”, that is to say, she falls for eternity like a prophetic poet.
As the title suggests, Mud Blood Bone—produced with Drew Vandenberg (Toro Y Moi, S.G. Goodman, Faye Webster) and recorded at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia—is about the intersection between humans and nature. For numerous records, such as 2023’s Down Rounder, Clyde’s attention has primarily been on personal evolution. Where is she headed? Who is she? Yes, a dark-night-of-the-soul musician.
Before you get the impression Clyde is St. John of the Cross or Van Morrison, let’s knock that on its head. However, Clyde is an old soul with an even older voice; it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that she was born a hundred years ago beneath a harvest moon. The fact is, she can sing R&B, blues, roots music, and rockabilly—you name it. For Mud Blood Bone, Cogan plays the role of a country singer, complete with drawl and twang; there are moments when you get the impression that she is going to challenge Belle Starr to a duel.
As Mud Blood Bone is a country album, the aforementioned genre’s archetypal themes—heartbreak and loneliness—imbue the record. In fact, the search for love is what besets the narrator, who is also preoccupied with the passage of time, as if seeing nature for the first and last time. Moreover, Mud Blood Bone is a documentation of self-actualization.
Occasionally, Clyde’s foray into country songwriting fails, although more often than not, it succeeds. Like Boy Golden (she features in his song, “Cowboy Dreams”, from his latest album), Clyde on Mud Blood Bone delves into cowboy pop, which is ultimately its downfall; sometimes it lacks life, the very life Clyde normally breathes into her songs that can bring the dead back to life.
It isn’t to put Clyde’s authenticity into question—she is the real deal. Clyde can sing in whatever genre, in whatever guise. That said, if one were to compare Mud Blood Bone with 2021’s Blue Blue Blue, her collaborative album with roots musician Jeremie Albino, it is a million miles apart in terms of serving a genre, which in that case is both blues and folk. On the album, Clyde slips into the role of a folk and blues songstress with no thought to herself, an act of self-abnegation that only the best singers understand and even fewer achieve.
The opener, “Where Is My Love”, is a forgettable John Prine-esque tune; the emptiness that the singer feels engulfs the song. The second track, “Man’s World”, offers little with a steel guitar taken right from the roots duo Larkin Poe and trite lyrics. It takes until “Wild One”, the third song, to realize Clyde’s enormous talent.
Indubitably, Clyde’s talent is in large part due to her gritty, soulful voice, which she sidesteps Adrianne Lenker to reach the purity of Sara Carter before sullying it with a melancholic croon that would make Karen Dalton raise an eyebrow. Conversely, she can express drama by one seemingly simple elongation of a syllable. Either way, she makes you believe rather than question, feel rather than think.
The piano-led ballad, “I Am Now”, takes a sharp turn in the second half, with a weeping pedal steel and violin that echo the Nashville Sound of the 1950s. The cover of Marty Robbins’ “My Love” is the pick of the bunch, in which, abetted by a tremolo-inflected guitar and snare-brushed flourishes, the singer gives themselves to the prairie, like an ancient bard invoking one of the nine Muses on Mount Olympus. The cowpunk “Wanna Ride” is the equivalent of Clyde kicking you in the stomach with her cowboy boots, as if to remind you that Kitty Wells rocked like the Ramones before you were born.
Clyde’s foray into country songwriting can be as effective as it is impactful. In “Dark Back”, Clyde opens with “Dogs were barking the moon was black / As we stood there swaying with the dark on our backs,” a couplet that would have made Hank Williams smile between taking swigs from a bottle. “Night Eyes” is another successful homage to country, complete with stately electric guitar work and vibraphone, which builds with a piano before erupting with a syrupy violin and pedal steel not unlike a Patsy Cline ballad.
Undoubtedly, Cat Clyde is immensely talented, but Mud Blood Bone is a frustrating listen due to occasional missteps and a questionable cowboy-pop aesthetic. In any case, the record showcases Clyde knows eternity like the back of her hand. Sometimes, she lets you catch a glimpse of it, too. Time regained.