Bluebird Café Berlin Rec. K.C. McKanzie : The widow tries to hide (D,2006)***°
When I heard KC McKenzie first on myspace, I noticed the singer’s beautifully coloured voice.
She seems to be influenced by folk singer-songwriter styles and bluegrass, but perhaps also alternative country, even when the duo is more jazzy-flavoured. This interest in more rooted styles, is for instance noticeable in the rhythmically easiest tracks “where’s that boy of mine?”, but also there they always find their own voice in it. The combination of their style interests, with nice guitar playing, good voice, and perfectly fitting double bass warmth, reminds me, just technically a bit of the world of the Canadian Heather McCleod (reviewed on next page). The fine guitar style and beautiful voice with simple double bass rhythm for me works exceptionally well on some melancholic tracks like “These Embers” and “Hobo’s Lullaby”. Just one track like “Brother, my brother” would also fit well with the jazzy folkrock band Pentangle with Bert Jansch singing, proving once more a well thought over guitar style and good vocal melody line interpretation. “His Whore” has a more alternative country-rock element (with violin, drums), and is a more aggressive conscious textual statement. Nice also is the mandolin-like guitar on “The Restless Wander”, and also “the wall” has the same kind of bluegrass like guitar playing.
When listening one layer deeper than just stylistically, -which gave already an entirely successful result-, the music is pretty dark and has an un-emphasised sadness. All songs are related with one another perfectly, and are departing widow songs. The texts are very understandable, and with just a minimum of poetic expressions, they can become even more confronting than pure poetry could do (“Oh how I miss your cold skin today” or “wash his clothes, wash his body, some things never dry”).
The singer is a close duo with Joe Budinsky on bass and (for one track) drums. Other guests are Friedrich Paravicini on cello and violin, Jonas Larrson and Digger Barnes on vocals and Jan Ufe Bernes on e-guit.
T3 Rec. 
K.C. McKanzie : Hammer & Nails (D,2008)****
I already mentioned in the first release that KC McKanzie has an attractive voice, but also a conscious way of singing. Here and there are added tasteful harmonic vocal arrangements. Much more than before, wherever they found their style interests, the duo came to their own sound which became an ever cosy warm sound that follow the song lines, but dressed them with almost jazzy double bass, banjo and acoustic guitar mostly. Not only musically, but also lyrically, KC McKanzie’s made a second chapter after the duo’s debut. Just like in life experiences, even things and persons that are missed and lost, makes us more conscious, and each step is taken at first more carefully, at a distance, for we tend to guard the past, in things of change, with a wish to infiltrate the loss with a new meaning in all what we come across anew. But as keepers of its qualities we can hardly add new meanings, so that a danger appears, to keep us like lonely witnesses, being eaten away by the incomparable, which could also leave us with self-destruction. In that case, newly meeting people should be warned to take care as much for her attention to certain qualities as much as she remembers these qualities, in order not to lose all situations further. However, in destiny, similar evolutions could repeat itself, and things tend to become lost later, or parted sooner, again, or with some more rewarding experience and quality, in the end.
