Big City Blues Magazine

This review first appeared in June/July 2021 Blues Reviews

For most of their band life, Kentuckians Anna Kline and John Looney were known, for nearly ten years, as the bluegrass duo, Grits & Soul—playing unapologetic music that often converged at the confluence of bluegrass, classic country, Southern soul and the blues. Swift Silver marks a consequential waypost for the southern songwriters as it is a 180 degree (re)turn to those musical roots—the drawling tremolo of rhythm & blues, the saving strains of Southern gospel and the twang of the rural soul. Kline’s vocal performances, especially on lead, reveal a breathtaking range of skillful flexibility a la Tracy Nelson while Looney gives a crackerjack performance on lead guitar, “not only displaying his expertise as an integral sideman but also as a talented arranger, showcasing a finely tuned ear for nuance and groove,” as the press-notes aver. The album contains eight Kline/Looney originals along with a beguiling cover of Carter Stanley’s “The Fields Have Turned Brown”—a steadfast tip of the hat to their lives as bluegrass musicians with some deft harmonies that recall Johnny Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town.” It’s hard to pick favorites among the originals as they all boast robust melodies, striking story lines and insightfully eloquent, timely lyrics when weighed through the lens of current events. I’ll cite a couple here but leave the rest for you to discover, also a lyric sheet would have been nice and well deserved. At the heart of the album, turns out, is the energetically current commentary “Come Home To Yourself” that’s navigated in fine fettle by a fuzzed-out guitar refrain that adroitly takes the astute listener all the way back to the Mississippi blues by way of hard-core Texas blues while the Beatles-esque “Blackbird’s Refrain” is a clever, anthem-like plea for the world to “come together” (with some great slide guitar from Looney) and the moody, Grayson Capps-like “We All Get Our Turn.” Genius at work.

—Gary von Tersch