Album Review: The Milk Carton Kids - The Ash & Clay

With just two guitars and two voices, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan – the duo who make up The Milk Carton Kids – have managed to create a stunning emotional landscape that plays as gently and peacefully as a breeze. Their beautiful nu-folk sound rings in strong influences, from the perfectly measured harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel, along with the whispered vocals and simple guitars of Joshua Radin, with a splash of Bob Dylan thrown in for good measure.

Hope Of A Lifetime opens the album with a troubadour epiphany of sorts – “That's the way they used to find their way home/By the stars/On their own” – while a bluesy hook meanders its way through Snake Eyes, a track that subtly opens with a nod to old gospel hymns with the lads pleading, “Swing low, swing low”.

America and its current state takes a knock in the title track, a gentle lullaby that sighs, “What, oh, have we done to run this country into such a sight”. Promised Land boasts a chorus with a chord progression eerily similar to Dylan's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, but it's not so much imitation as homage to the godfather of folk.

The guitar takes a sombre step into the background as the pair's vocals drive album closer, Memphis, a melancholic look back at Graceland and the kingdom that once was: “Now the sun goes down over Dolly Parton bridge/The one-time home of soul takes our country's final breath”.

Steady, simple and beautiful, The Ash And Clay is heartache-soothing material that proves folk is not dead.