Robert Plant’s latest album Band of Joy (2010) won’t grab you with hard-rocking riffs, won’t blow you away with heavy blues stomps, won’t wow you with pyrotechnic guitar solos. The music on this album is more subtle than that. Plant has had quite the successful solo career since Led Zeppelin, moving from hard rock via new-wave AOR to folk rock at the turn of the millennium. Last year his bluegrass collaboration with Alison Krauss even won him a Grammy for Album of the Year. Here we get an album filled with mandolin and banjo, wistful harmonies, and delectable percussion, where English folk and country & western meet, where rock and roll rubs shoulders with rhythm and blues, where spiritual and secular, where the sacred and the profane come together musing on love and life and the hereafter.
The album’s opening track is the swinging “Angel Dance,” originally by Los Lobos, which they give an electric bluegrass rocking treatment. The song encourages us to ease our worries, let the children dance, and after a good night sleep all will be better tomorrow. But Plant’s delivery hints at a more celestial, more angelic better day. His refelctions on the End of Time continue when we dive straight into “House of Cards,” by Richard Thompson (Fairport Convention), where they shake things up in a loose folk rocker that could just as well be Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, with some Jackson Brown and CSNY thrown in for good measure. Plant’s sole original composition, “Central Two-O-Nine,” is reminiscent of the country blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Leadbelly.
On “You Can’t Buy Me Love,” originally by R&B singer Barbara Lynn (1965), Band of Joy sounds like The Beatles with a little gumption from The Kinks. (Don’t let the rockin’ ‘n’ reeling trick you, this is no ode to love.) They turn Jimmie Rodger’s country & western tune, “I’m Falling in Love Again” into 1950s country soul, with a Sam Cooke feel and Nashville slides. Milton Mapes’ “The Only Sound That Matters” becomes a forgotten Rolling Stones out-take from the late 70s. I’m not particularly partial to the Appalachian traditional that goes by various names, “Get Along Home, Cindy,” “Cindy, I’ll Marry You Some Day.”
For this Cricket the real high points come with the distorted feedback of Low’s “Silver Rider” (already nominated for a Grammy) and “Monkey,” which Band of Joy perform like dirges with Plant well-nigh whispering and Patti Griffin sighing in mourning. Another beautiful meditation on mortality comes with the cover of Townes Van Zandt’s last song “Harm’s Swift Way.” The album ends with two more contemplations on the passing of time. First, the arrangement by Plant and co-producer Buddy Miller of the traditional spiritual “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down” is as gloomy and ghostly as it is menacing, with a subtle interplay between banjo and electric guitar. Lastly, Band of Joy remake 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Tilton’s “Even This Shall Pass Away” into a rollicking stomper with a grinding, buzzing bass, and screeching guitars from the Book of Fripp and Eno.
Fans of Led Zeppelin may look for clues all they want as to what a Led Zep come back may sound like. They won’t find it here. And may I remind them of Walking to Clarksdale? Case in point. It speaks volumes for Plant that he resists hopping on the reunion bandwagon to milk that cow for what it’s worth and bring home the fat bacon (to mix a few rustic metaphors). Plant’s voice is obviously unmistakable, but don’t be fooled by reviews talking about “misty mountains” and “battles of evermore” and “houses of the holy.” Referencing over a century of musical history, Band of Joy is as timeless as it is fresh. With Pro Tools easily setting sessions in Abbey Road, Carnegie Hall, the Athenian Acropolis, or a Tennessee barn, Miller decidedly evades an overtly slick production in favor of a crisp and clear sound that’s loose and intimate, and entirely in the here-and-now. Let’s be grateful Plant continues refusing to wallow in the nostalgia of his gloriously excessive yesteryears! Get the album now! (It’s downloadable for only $1.99)
The album’s opening track is the swinging “Angel Dance,” originally by Los Lobos, which they give an electric bluegrass rocking treatment. The song encourages us to ease our worries, let the children dance, and after a good night sleep all will be better tomorrow. But Plant’s delivery hints at a more celestial, more angelic better day. His refelctions on the End of Time continue when we dive straight into “House of Cards,” by Richard Thompson (Fairport Convention), where they shake things up in a loose folk rocker that could just as well be Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, with some Jackson Brown and CSNY thrown in for good measure. Plant’s sole original composition, “Central Two-O-Nine,” is reminiscent of the country blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Leadbelly.
On “You Can’t Buy Me Love,” originally by R&B singer Barbara Lynn (1965), Band of Joy sounds like The Beatles with a little gumption from The Kinks. (Don’t let the rockin’ ‘n’ reeling trick you, this is no ode to love.) They turn Jimmie Rodger’s country & western tune, “I’m Falling in Love Again” into 1950s country soul, with a Sam Cooke feel and Nashville slides. Milton Mapes’ “The Only Sound That Matters” becomes a forgotten Rolling Stones out-take from the late 70s. I’m not particularly partial to the Appalachian traditional that goes by various names, “Get Along Home, Cindy,” “Cindy, I’ll Marry You Some Day.”For this Cricket the real high points come with the distorted feedback of Low’s “Silver Rider” (already nominated for a Grammy) and “Monkey,” which Band of Joy perform like dirges with Plant well-nigh whispering and Patti Griffin sighing in mourning. Another beautiful meditation on mortality comes with the cover of Townes Van Zandt’s last song “Harm’s Swift Way.” The album ends with two more contemplations on the passing of time. First, the arrangement by Plant and co-producer Buddy Miller of the traditional spiritual “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down” is as gloomy and ghostly as it is menacing, with a subtle interplay between banjo and electric guitar. Lastly, Band of Joy remake 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Tilton’s “Even This Shall Pass Away” into a rollicking stomper with a grinding, buzzing bass, and screeching guitars from the Book of Fripp and Eno.
Fans of Led Zeppelin may look for clues all they want as to what a Led Zep come back may sound like. They won’t find it here. And may I remind them of Walking to Clarksdale? Case in point. It speaks volumes for Plant that he resists hopping on the reunion bandwagon to milk that cow for what it’s worth and bring home the fat bacon (to mix a few rustic metaphors). Plant’s voice is obviously unmistakable, but don’t be fooled by reviews talking about “misty mountains” and “battles of evermore” and “houses of the holy.” Referencing over a century of musical history, Band of Joy is as timeless as it is fresh. With Pro Tools easily setting sessions in Abbey Road, Carnegie Hall, the Athenian Acropolis, or a Tennessee barn, Miller decidedly evades an overtly slick production in favor of a crisp and clear sound that’s loose and intimate, and entirely in the here-and-now. Let’s be grateful Plant continues refusing to wallow in the nostalgia of his gloriously excessive yesteryears! Get the album now! (It’s downloadable for only $1.99)
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