Portland Phoenix | No Mere Mortal Woman: Clay Camero rumbles the earth with new EP 'Cool Blue Shadows'

There’s something inherently mysterious about womanhood. As a woman, I feel it, I know it intimately, and it still seems to defy me. Emotions arise that I had no idea belonged to me. Shadow sides ebb and flow alongside very pragmatic facets of my day to day life, messing with me like some kind of demon hellbent on exposing my most intimate fears and fantasies to my coworkers or the young man tasked with ringing up my groceries. The same things could be said about nature, particularly here in Maine, where it often seems like Mother Earth has mood swings and spiritual fluctuations that put even the most powerful matriarch to shame. Enigmatic, feral and powerful beyond measure, it is this oneness of woman and nature through which Clay Camero and the County Line Bandits’ EP Cool Blue Shadows embarks on its vision quest.  

Clare Hubbard, who has also played under the monikers Caethua, Sports, CAMMO, and (as a duo) Ancestral Diet, inhabits Clay Camero as a ghost might inhabit a sheet and explore the halls of a long abandoned, dilapidated barn. Her County Line Bandits are a brilliant chorus of appropriately-named support on this record, with Colbra White on guitar and vocals, Grey Saguaro on guitar and vocals, Dylan Kumnick on drums, Bobby New on pedal steel, Musky Pockets on bass and Tommy Hellfingers on keys, while Hubbard writes, plays guitar and sings lead. Cool Blue Shadows is a simply gorgeous, engaging five-song EP, as precise in its looseness as it is unabashed about its own coyness and curiosity.