Out on the tiles
Fourteen years after Raising Sand, the superstar harmony duo return to lofty heights. By John Mulvey
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
★★★★ Raise The Roof WARNER MUSIC. CD/DL/LP
MORE THAN most, Robert Plant knows the value of a good myth. In his telling, one suspects, even a trip to the supermarket can become an epic quest across the Welsh Marches. There will be ancient paths retraced, mystical scholarship indulged and, ultimately, redemption – though what Plant returns with might not be what those at home were expecting. He can bring a certain nobility to career choices both capricious and expedient, and romantic gravity to the most pragmatic decisions.
So it is with this second album in the company of Alison Krauss and producer T Bone Burnett, and its artful wrangling of country, folk, blues and R&B into a misty recalibration of Americana. On one level, it can be framed as a spiritually fulfilling passion project, as can anything Plant does that isn’t Led Zeppelin. On another, it makes exceptionally good business sense, 2007’s Raising Sand having sold over a million in the US and 600,000 in the UK alone.
Listening to Raise The Roof, the formula still works a treat. While the title might suggest wild times on the old homestead, the revelries are measured. Randy Weeks’s Can’t Let
Go, learned from Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels On A
Gravel Road, is springy juke joint fare, but there’s still something a little eerie, even Lynchian, about the way Bill Frisell’s twanging guitar reverberates in the empty corners. A take on Jimmy Reed’s High And Lonesome, meanwhile, replaces blues swagger with mellotron strings and a kind of ceremonial portent that conjures up the menace, if not the exact sound, of Led Zeppelin. It’s marvellous.
There’s a decent argument to be made that privileging atmospherics and good taste over raw emotion amounts to an evisceration of roots music; that a vaguely uncanny air might not be a proper substitute for lived experience. But then trying to mimic the authenticity of a country blues artist like Geeshie Wiley is more problematic still, and Krauss, to her credit, treats a 1930 nugget like Wiley’s Last Kind Words Blues with invention and respect. “Let the buzzards eat me whole,” she incants, a model of crystalline poise, while Plant adds understated harmonies, and Stuart Duncan (mandolin) and Marc Ribot (guitar) stalk each other in the background.
Like its predecessor, Raise The Roof is skilful at drawing affinities between country and blues. But unlike Raising
Sand, its sequel expands the remit to fold British folk music into the mix. Plant at his most windswept recasts Anne Briggs’ Go Your Way as a restrained epic – listen to how much fun he has stuffing extra syllables into the phrase “Woe is me”. And Krauss provides perhaps the album’s highlight when she glides through Bert Jansch’s It Don’t Bother Me, transporting the song from Bunjies Coffee House to an ethereal Appalachia, as the chimes of a marxophone add further silvery mystique. The world it manifests is, perhaps, little more realistic than Middle Earth. But the trick of finding magic in earthy tradition – a speciality of Plant, the old fabulist, for over 50 years – remains as seductive as ever.