What can be associated with the word "country"? For many music lovers, this lexeme will inspire thoughts of a soft guitar sound, a jaunty banjo and romantic melodies about distant lands and sincere love.
Nevertheless, among modern musical groups, not everyone is trying to work according to the “patterns” of the pioneers, and many artists are trying to create new branches in their genre. These include the band The Dead South.
Group path to success
The Dead South was formed back in 2012 by two talented Canadian musicians from Regina, Nate Hilt and Danny Kenyon. Prior to this, both members of the future "quartet" played in a not very promising grunge group.
The original line-up of The Dead South consisted of four musicians: Nate Hilt (vocals, guitar, mandolin), Scott Pringle (guitar, mandolin, vocals), Danny Kenyon (cello and vocals) and Colton Crawford (banjo). In 2015, Colton left the group for three years, but later decided to return to the established line-up.
The musicians gained their first fame on live performances in front of the public. The Dead South recorded their first mini-album in 2013. His track list included five full-fledged compositions, which the audience received very warmly.
The very next year, the band decided to record a full-length album Good Company, which was released under the auspices of the German label Devil Duck Records.
The album significantly expanded the group's fan audience, and The Dead South spent almost two years on large-scale tours outside of their native Canada.
The lead single from the second album, In Hell I'll Be In Good Company, received its own video clip in October 2016. The video, in which funny Canadians in hats and suspenders dance in various locations, has gained more than 185 million views on YouTube.
Eliza Mary Doyle, a well-known solo and studio Canadian musician, replaced him during the absence of the virtuoso banjo player Crawford. Returning to the composition of Crawford allowed Doyle to devote more time to solo work.
Third and fourth albums
The album Illusion & Doubt was the third in the band's career, and thanks to it the band gained significant success. After its release in 2016, the album very quickly entered the top 5 of the Billboard Bluegrass chart.
The premiere was warmly received not only by the band's fans, but also by music critics, for example, Amanda Haters from the Canadian Beats noted that although the album has a traditional country sound, this does not deprive the group of the ability to make attractive and unusual music.
Especially highly music experts rated the tracks Boots, Miss Mary and Hard Day. In the latter, according to them, the talent of vocalist Hilt was able to fully reveal itself.
The musicians of the group do not please the public with frequent premieres of albums - the fourth album Sugar & Joy by The Dead South was released only in 2019, three years after the last major release. It is noteworthy that all the songs on the Sugar & Joy album were composed and recorded outside the musicians' hometown, which cannot be said about previous albums.
Dead South style
You can have endless discussions about the definition of the style of The Dead South - in some compositions classical folk prevails, somewhere the sound goes into bluegrass, and somewhere there are even standard techniques of "garage" rock music.
The musicians speak unambiguously about their work - according to them, the group plays in the style of blues-folk-rock with country elements.
However, the style of the group would not be perceived so holistically if it was sustained only in the auditory key. Appearance for the musicians of The Dead South is an integral part of the image.
On stage and in video clips, the guys prefer to appear exclusively in white shirts and black trousers with suspenders, and the artists prefer stylish (mostly black) hats as headwear.
The songs of The Dead South delight the listener with high-quality storytelling - either we are talking about betrayals and lovers, or a hardened bandit shares his life story, or a fatal beauty shoots the main character with a revolver.
Such creativity may be of interest to an English-speaking listener, or at least to that music lover who is able to catch individual familiar words in the texts, but this does not mean that if the listener speaks “you” with English, then he has nothing to look for in The Dead South songs.
A high-quality sound, together with bold musical moves and Hilt's pleasant vocals, will not leave indifferent any connoisseur of foreign music.
The members of The Dead South do not limit themselves to their own creativity, sometimes paying tribute to famous musicians of a bygone era with high-quality cover versions of their works.
So, in 2016, the band performed the imperishable folk ballad of The Animals called The House of the Rising Sun. The artists added the author's sound to the song, and the composition "played with new colors." The video has received over 9 million views on YouTube.
The Dead South is that country that cannot be called classic, despite the fact that it is made with a polite nod to the "origins".
Sometimes gloomy, sometimes ironic and light-heartedly cheerful - the songs of this group always immerse the listener in a unique atmosphere and create a special mood.
