Reviews

The Cousins Project
Album: Child Of The Hills
Label: Thunder Ridge
Tracks: 13
Website: https://www.mayonemusic.com/

Actual second cousins from opposite branches of a family, Kristina Stykos and Steve Mayone made their duo debut in 2013 with Beautiful Blood. Twelve years later, recorded in producer Stykos's Vermont studio with Jeff Berlin on drums it ranges musically from bucolic folk to heavier bluesy rock. Opening with the folksy instrumental 'Green Mountain Moonrise' with Stykos on keys and Mayone on guitar and lap steel, it cranks things up on the slow swaggering love will set is free blues 'This World Is Broken' featuring mandolin and Neal Massa on piano solo turning to Mayone on lead for the Eastern-tinted masochistic psych-folk 'Your Bitter Love'. There's a lighter touch to the acoustic fingerpicking of 'Traveller', a restless letting go and moving on song ("It's better to emancipate/The love you can't contain") with Stykas on mandola, she taking over for the cascading vocal notes of 'And the Love Came Pouring Out', a poignant reminiscence of a late lover ("I will always hear you in my memory/Leaving messages on my machine/It would be at least six months before I could/Bring myself to erase anything").

Massa on organ and Patrick Ross on fiddle, sung by Mayone 'What'd Ya Come Here For' has a bluegrass jauntiness to a tale of the unwanted reunion of a Bonnie and Clyde couple twenty years after their last heist ("What'd ya come here for, you better go/Or there'll be hell to pay when my wife gets home/You're saying I'm the one that walked away scot free/I always knew one day you'd be the death of me").

Mayone on lead vocals and acoustic guitar, the syntax mangling, itchy rhythm blues 'Shows To Go Ya' is another song where the return of a former lover isn't greeted with open arms ("It seems you haven't learned from your mistakes …haven't we been here before/Bended on your knee, and promising to me/That you're not a loner, you just need someone to hold ya/You're an old Deadhead, stuck on Scarlet Begonias").

Featuring lap steel and banjo, 'Woods Road' is a spare bluegrass number about a trucker being stuck on the highway with fuel low and the snow piling up with no alternative but to try and walk home, while Stykos takes semi-spoken lead and adds ukulele for the slow, scratchy 'Give It Time', clinging to hope when things are dark ("we are one/Like diamonds in the rain/Stronger than deceptions/Or shame/Seeded by the stars/And guided by the flame I can see a future again…They tell me I'm crazy/They try to shut me down/They say I'm making trouble/That my words are not allowed/But I know that you hear me/And that feels fine").

Mayone sitting it out, Seamus Egan on low whistle affords a Celtic flavour to 'Wandering', another brand new day after the storm number, Moira Smiley adding backing vocals while Stykos speaks the lyrics, the path heading into the folksy strum of 'This Green Valley', this time Mayone basking in the wood smoke and family reunion.

Stykos singing lead with a gravelly tone like a rasping Melanie, the title track heads to the close speaking of connection and finding home, both physically and emotionally, ending with the vocally softer fingerpicked, drums puttering 'The Story Tree' where the metaphorical branches provide shelter and comfort ("Open your windows so your world can heal/When the birds sing know that it's me/Atop the branches of the story tree").

Listening to the album, I was reminded of Jackson Browne's 'A Child In These Hills;'where he sings that he's "looking for life". You'll find it here.

Mike Davies

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