There’s no doubting the impact Robert Plant and Alison Krauss made when they first recorded together. “The unlikely alchemy of a hard-rock legend and a bluegrass superstar” created an album that went on to win five Grammys. Yet 14 long years were to elapse before Raising Sand was followed by this new release.
Plant has had an enduring affection for the boy-girl format since linking with Sandy Denny for Led Zeppelin IVs The Battle Of Evermore a whole half-century ago. Saving Grace, a quintet in which he shares vocals with Suzi Dian, recently toured the UK on a low-profile basis. And don’t forget Patti Griffin, his one-time lover, with whom he co-fronted the Y2K Version of the Band Of Joy.
It is unclear whether any of the dozen tracks on Raise The Roof are holdovers - there's never been official confirmation an aborted second album was even started. But Plant has been dropping reunion hints since the standalone Light Of Christmas Day slipped out on 2015 movie Soundtrack Love The Coopers. And given his oft-witnessed ability to shapeshift musically, it was no real surprise when the duo reconvened in Nashville four years later.
They’d first sung together at a 2004 Leadbelly tribute concert when Plant was seduced by the “evocative promise" in his partner’s voice: “It was as if it was waiting to be opened up more.” Bluegrass singer/fiddler Krauss’ followers, amassed over some years (now 50, she began in her early teens), were happy to share their idol with a wider world.
The production of T Bone Burnett (Los Lobos, Elvis Costello, Gregg Allman, etc) was - and is again here - crucial. He it was who, with an art forger’s wiles, created the frame within which the two contrasting vocal styles painted their pictures.
But Raising Sand polarized Plant fans; some considered it “overproduced dinner-party music" while others rated it the best release of his “mature” vocal penod. Certainly the combination of the Briton’s spontaneity and the American’s vocal purity wooed many for whom Zeppelin were simply too brash.
Opening track Quattro (World Drifts In) dates from 2003 and is by some distance the most recent song covered. Hearing Calexico’s original made Krauss believe another album could be on the cards - unsurprisingly, since Joey Bums’ vocal could easily be mistaken for Plant.
Conversely, The Price of Love is virtually unrecognizable. The harmony has been all but sucked out of it, in a darker, spookier reinvention delivered at funereal pace. It's the duo’s third Everly Brothers cover after the earlier album’s Gone Gone Gone and Stick With Me Baby, both chirpy duets by comparison. There’s clearly been a shift in mood, producer Burnett crediting Krauss with seeking to slow things down and thereby increase intensity.
British folk legends Anne Briggs and Bert Jansch (a Jimmy Page favourite of old) are represented by Go Your Way and It Don’t Bother Me. The lead vocal genders are reversed as the pair often do, Krauss making a fine job of the Jansch song. As on stage with Saving Grace, Plant hovers in the wings before emerging with a perfectly targeted contribution, in this case a drone-like counterpoint. One review of Raising Sand likened the tactic to “a courtship dance", and the pair’s sparing vocal combinations make the eventual full-blooded vocal harmony a joyous release.
Krauss delivers Trouble With My Lover (penned by Allen Toussaint for Betty Harris) over a jazzy Nina Simone-style bassline, while another 60s obscurity, Searching for My Love, finds Plant in soul pastiche mode. While it’s tempting to link the latter with territory explored on 1984’s Honeydrippers mini album, he Claims to have sung the Robert Moore And The Rhythm Aces song at school.
Having helmed a solo track apiece, the pair’s reunion for Can't Let Go, popularized by Lucinda Williams, is a tad too resigned and is the album’s first disappointment. We’re soon back on track with You Led Me To The Wrong, a murder ballad from the repertoire of 30s Appalachian folk and bluegrass singer lola Belle Reed. Krauss contributes instrumentally rather than vocally but this is Plant's tour de force, a bleak, eerie tale with an inevitable “gallows pole" conclusion. The juxtaposition of Geeshie Wiley’s Last Kind Words Blues is clearly no coincidence, the pair’s harmonising cleansing the palate.
The album’s sole original, Plant and Burnetts High And Lonesome, possesses a nagging, Zep-esque insistence, but any chance of a rocky climax dies with Going Where The Lonely Go. Merle Haggard’s surprisingly recent (40-year-old) country hit enjoys the Krauss “slow ’em down and wind ’em up" treatment, Steel guitar making its presence felt for the first time.
Somebody Was Watching Over Me, most recently associated with the late Pops Staples, takes us out on a spiritual, roof-raising note. The kitchen sink is thrown at this one, piano making a rare appearance alongside buzzsaw guitar and Lucinda Williams’ distinctive backing vocal.
The mood of Raise The Roof is a fair few notches darker and edgier than its predecessor, released when the memory of 9/11 was still fresh. If not exactly easy listening, Raising Sand offered a reassuring dose of Americana with a twist, while the new release cuts back on the country influences to adopt a bleaker perspective. And if the introductory shock of Plant and Krauss’ vocal combination is inevitably absent, is that any reason to mess with a good thing? Maybe after the stresses and strains of the past couple of years we need a familiar embrace to soothe away our pain. Raise The Roof fits the bill, even if it might win fewer prizes for originality than its predecessor.
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