Review: Swift Silver Hits Their Southern Rock Stride on Self-Titled Debut

If you're familiar with the bluegrass duo Grits & Soul, and you may be even if you don't know it considering their numerous appearances at roots festivals and a performance on Bizarre Foods, then you already know Swift Silver... kind of. The core of Grits & Soul, Anna Kline and John Looney, are also the core of Swift Silver. The name change came with a sonic shift, from bluegrass to Southern rock and roll, with obvious soul and gospel influences. Think Muscle Shoals by way of Kentucky with a stop off in Nashville on the trip down. With their self-titled debut album, they prove themselves more than capable of handling the heavy guitar and blues vocals required of the new style.

From the album's first track, “Belleville Blues”, you know this is a very different outfit than Grits & Soul. The electric guitar tone is fat, slide-enhanced, and pure rock and roll in the vein of great Southern rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Charlie Daniels Band. Vocally, Kline displays a talent for soulful wails and powerful belts. When she belts out “I follow no man's path but my own,” you know this is a woman who is dead serious about going her own way. Here, and throughout most of the album, the best comparison is Tedeschi-Trucks Band.

Throughout the album, they try their hand at variations on Southern rock styles. “We All Get Our Turn” is a shimmering pure soul number, featuring strong harmony vocals from Looney. “We've Given Up on Us” is a straight ahead beer hall ballad in the traditional country vein. Spouses fight, someone cheats, and everyone ends up with tears in their beers. It's a style that can border on (or, at times, charge headlong into) corniness in the wrong hands, but Swift Silver handles it well.

But the album's standout track throws back to their roots, to some degree. A Looney-headed cover of The Stanley Brothers' “The Fields Have Turned Brown” keeps the high and lonesome vocals of the original, as well as some of its acoustic strum, but adds a serious punch of Dickey Betts-esque electric guitar throughout. One assumes it wasn't the album opener because they wanted a clean break from their former group, but in some ways it should have been because it's the perfect baton-pass from one to the other.

While the duo may have decided to name their new project Swift Silver, in many ways their previous band name fits their current one better. The grits of the South (and the grit of Southern rock) mix perfectly with the soul of Muscle Shoals to create something different enough to draw new fans, but also lure all but the most purist of Grits & Soul fans.