Golden Shoals - Golden Shoals (2020)

After seven years and three albums as Hoot and Holler, Asheville-based duo Amy Alvey and Mark Kilianski have rechristened – though not necessarily reinvented – themselves. As Golden Shoals, they retain their bluegrass roots but expand to embrace Americana, indie-country and even some experimental touches. They’ve also bolstered the instrumentation with their basic guitar, fiddle and banjo format augmented with organ, electric guitar and bass, upright bass and even drums.

Each singing their own compositions of love and loss, upbeat and lively is the default musical mode. Golden Shoals opens with the stomping, hot club fiddle swaying Everybody’s Singing, a nod to the oddballs you meet in the music business. It’s followed by the same old-time gypsy jazz swing feel as Alvey takes over on vocals for the “nothing gonna get me down” Live Easy and, passing the baton back to Kilianski, the frisky fingerpicking of Old Buffalo where the lyrics suggest a poor hobo is happier than some wall street boy chasing the money. Indeed, even as he sings (Who’da Thought) Thinkin’ ‘Bout The Good Times (Could Ever Make You Feel So Bad), the music positively sets the feet tapping.

Not that they don’t take the tempo and the mood down a notch or two, cases in point being Kilianski’s honky-tonk swayer I’ll Fall In Love Again (an unrequited love song about a failed attempt to be more than friends) and Alvey’s strummed waltzing campfire croon of the disillusioned and displaced in love song New Friend. Likewise, they also add more muscle here and there, Love From Across The Border more inclined to classic early Eagles stylings with an acerbic lyric about self-reflection (“It took me far too long before I finally realized/I didn’t know how to compromise”) on which, addressing notions of privilege, Kilianski sings “hey man, stick it up your ass… you came out the womb on a silver spoon, now you’ll be going back in in a body cast”.

Like the water mentioned in the lyrics, banjo burbles through Alvey’s summery Honey You Don’t Know My Mind while its strummed acoustic carries along her waltz-time ‘let’s see what happens’ Dawn Of A New Morning with Matt Lohan on tenor guitar as she sings “you’re lucky to have me, I’m sticking round… but if I sense something funny I’ll make my way through that door, you’re lucky I know my own worth”.

For the first of the last two Kilianski numbers, it’s back to darkling bluegrass banjo and fiddle for the backwoods gothic of the urgent Brood of Hate, The track originally featured on their 2018 split album with The Old-time Snake Milkers, variously notes how “everyone wants to meet Jesus Christ, but nobody wants to die” and advises “don’t you ever trust no oil man” as he’ll “destroy your land and drink your blood like wine”, going on to add “There’s a monster in that White House / And he’s doing his very best / To bonify his bankroll / And a-hide his hollow breast”.

It’s followed with a kick drum beat and bouncy fiddle on the jaunty, vaguely Cajun-tinged bluesy Going Down, Down, Down (“my life is not a trainwreck so much as a building burning down slowly”), a number which builds to a rousing whoop and holler stomp.

Finally, it closes with Alvey’s simple acoustic Sittin’ Pretty, a melody that bears a hint of Roger Miller and a lyrics that speaks of both the travelling musician’s freedom and guilt in being detached from the nine to five grind and troubling daily issues everyone else has to deal with. Consistently musically infectious and emotionally weightier than it seems at first hearing, in their name change Golden Shoals have most definitely raised their bar.