Drawing their roots from classic Americana, Kassidy's sound is filtered through a very Glaswegian sensibility like a gang of renegades on a cold dark night. And they have a new single on the way...
'Kassidy's sound is filtered through a very Glaswegian sensibility like a gang of renegades on a cold dark night.'
Sounds good doesn't it...
“We started to think this is what we were meant to be doing,” says Barrie (guitar/vocals).
“People might think it’s a gimmick cause its not the usual thing you see, nowadays anyway, but I think it makes it more pure. It becomes very obvious when its a good song if you can do it without all the paraphenalia, the tricks and synthesisers and the security of electric noise. And it’s exciting. If you miss a chord or a string, people are gonna hear it, and that’s what keeps us on our toes. It’s mischevous, that’s the way I see it. Its about seeing how long we can go without screwing up, seeing how tight we can get with this. There’s thirty strings on stage, and any one of them could break at any moment.”
There is nothing gentle or precious about Kassidy. They have a vigour, pop sensibility and unadulterated passion that is purely Scottish. They stand side by side across the front of the stage like a gang of outlaw gunslingers and take no prisoners. The funky rhythms of interweaving guitars, the stomp of a beat box that Barrie James whacks with his foot, harmonies that stack up on the chorus like Phil Spector producing the Beach Boys, all can be heard on their debut 5 track ‘Rubbergum EP’. “We kind of take that acoustic west coast thing and shake it up in a pot with more modern influences and see what we can get,” according to Lewis. “ When it all gets going its like a wall of harmony, its mystical.”
The band all live and write songs together although Barry may be their prime motivator, an intense, driven young man from the down and dirty area of Yoker, who says he has never dreamed of anything other than playing music. “There was always an Echo Range acoustic guitar in our house and when I was really young I’d sit there looking at it. I was told that it was an ornament, ‘you’re not allowed to touch that!’ but I lusted after it, and when I picked it up it was comfortable right away.”
“I believe in melodies in the air,” says Barry. “You don’t even need a guitar or any musical instrument to write a song, there’s melody everywhere in everyone. Everytime you see a guy washing the windows, he’s gonna be singing or whistling. When a conversation flags, people start humming in their heads. Some of our songs are about things that are hidden, clandestine secrets, things that you can’t see but you know they’re there; some are mystical and metaphorical; some of them are about girls; and some of them are just rhythms and melodies and words. But when we play them, they sound like whatever you want them to be.”
With an album produced by Jim Abiss on the way Kassidy's debut single, Spray Cat, is out on 24th May.
Thursday, 25 March 2010
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