MUSIC

McGonigel's Mucky Duck presents Bruce and Kelly (Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis).

Kelly Willis’ voice swoops and offers a satiny sheen that is both silky and so fluid it threatens to slip through the notes being played by her and husband Bruce Robison’s crackerjack band. For years the darling of progressive country fans, the sweetheart of the post modern rodeo was both too cool and too traditional for what got on the radio. That said, there’s no argument about the kind of ice country the first couple of Austin’s roots music scene crafts. Loose-limbed, sweeping and designed to get those belt buckles polishing, it’s a testament to road houses, honky tonks, Wurlitzer jukeboxes and neon that’s fixing to buzz until it’s burned out.

Layers of luxurious steel guitar slather straightforward country music, bass thumping and following the melody line, drums kicking and the piano pushing a tide of notes and chords that’s let the songs ride. And what songs they are. Robison, obviously, has written some of mainstream’s country’s best songs – George Strait’s “Wrapped,” Tim McGraw’s “Angry All The Time” and the Dixie Chicks’ “Travelling Soldier.” But what the pair choose to embrace for themselves suggests the best of countrypolitan and western. Echoes of Tammy Wnynette, Ray Price and pre-Julio Willie Nelson can be heard: the trills in the thickest part of Willis’ warmed brandy sob and Robeson’s head-tossed back bleeting.

And when they join voices – as they did on “Walking Back In” – they almost evoke thw nimbleness of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. It is that easy merging to create a third voice that makes duet singing special, and they understand how to melt into, contrast and echo other instinctively. For as theoretically alt as the pair is thought to be, when their seasoned band slides into “Wrapped,” the song;s allure to George Strait is obvious. A song of being undone by an overwhelming crush on a woman over an easy shuffle with a backbeat that bangs like an unhinged door in a wind storm. Electric guitar laces up the melody line and Robison’s voice can take on a hint of shyness that makes the want sweet instead of lecherous.

That notion of the gulp being a baby steo suggests the monster’s shadow that’s really just a mouse in front of a flashlight under the bed. The kind of music purveyed by Willis, Robison and Country Music Hall of Famer Emmylou Harris is so salty, so gritty, so real and also lovely.