Satin Nickel is a band from New York that began as a collaboration between Samantha Aneson (vocals, guitar, banjo) and Morgan Hollingsworth (guitar, vocals, mandolin), who explored it as an intersection of Americana and folk. You can hear the Americana and folk influences on their new album Shadow of Doubt, but there are many more layers than just those two.
It doesn’t take long to figure out that this is a band that won’t allow itself to be pinned down to any particular style. The album contains subtle elements of bluegrass with the cello, mandolin and banjo. The band marries that with a healthy dose of rock – especially in the guitar. However, even the guitar tone varies from something like a Drive-By Truckers song (“Train Song”) to a spacey tone (“Good Love”) that you heard from a lot of moody bands in the 80s.
The band members do a great job of creating an atmosphere in these songs. In fact, this band is so good at creating atmosphere that each song sounds like a short-film script set to music. The impressive thing is that the band creates the feel of a song in a variety of ways. At some times, they accomplish this by featuring just guitar and vocals. At other times, like in “Last Night”, the mood is set by the spacey guitar sound and the cello. Throughout the album, the cello adds some dimension of mood to a song. In “Just Keep Running”, the fiddle adds some tension with sounds that would fit right into the soundtrack of a movie thriller.
If you want a snapshot of this band, “The Ballad of Yankee Jim” is a good example. In less than seven minutes, the band tells the rambling story of the last man who was hung in San Diego. This is a song that blends not only Americana and folk, but also rock (just listen to the guitar in the instrumental break) and even gospel. The gospel influence can be heard mostly in the chorus that features mostly vocals and claps. From: https://glidemagazine.com/242366/satin-nickel-marry-americana-folk-and-rock-on-shadow-of-doubt-album-review/
