WELCOMING The Deep Dark Woods to The Crescent on Friday, Please Please You concert promoter Joe Coates says: "Our beautiful Canadian friends are finally back in York in May."

Originally from Saskatchewan and now settled on the west coast, they fuse spooky prairie folk with Texas country blues and California psychedelia.

Returning after a four-year hiatus, Ryan Boldt and co are promoting Yarrow, their new album on the Six Shooter Records label, with a series of shows with fellow Canadian psych/folk duo Kacy & Clayton, whose own third album, The Siren's Song, has just come out too.

Floods and plagues, ghosts and slaughter: woe to those who populate the songs of Yarrow, as a gentle summer breeze swings the gallows ropes and flowers bloom callously on lovers’ graves. These Deep Dark Woods anthems are definitely not from Eden on an album rooted in scarlet fever a disease of the last century that proves a fitting backdrop for songs that dig bare handed into the loam to unearth the corpses of old English folk and country blues.

After a decade of Americana, the band have left the woods anew with a decidedly more macabre outlook, tapping into a rich vein of gothic surrealism that aligns with some of the great murder balladeers of our time. Appalachian soil ingrained under his fingernails, Boldt writes in a deep tradition of bleak and forlorn storytelling, drawing lines from Ireland to Tennessee, the Oxford Girl to Folsom Prison.

Support act Kacy & Clayton's new album was produced by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, who invited the duo of Kacy Anderson and Clayton Lithicum  to open all his Chicago band's shows on their last American tour. "With their classic, Sixties-style folk rock with soaring vocals and intricate guitar work, this pair are incredibly talented, so come down early," advises Joe Coates.

Tickets for Friday's 7.30pm double bill cost £12 from The Crescent, in The Crescent, Earworm Records, off Goodramgate, or Jumbo Records, or online at pleasepleaseyou.com