Robert Plant and my part in his renaissance: CD Review Robert Plant and the Band of Joy

But it was a great album, though it took me a while to realise it.

It combined Krauss’s bluegrass roots and Plants rock roots and met in a sort of fifties flavoured netherworld that brought out the best in both of them. Plant learnt to sing again, while Krauss affirmed her own position as the sweetest vocalist going and showed a bigger audience than usual why she had won more Grammy’s than any other artist.

For those who had travelled the musical route I’ve described, it was hard to think of a more fitting outcome.

All of which means that when it comes to the Band of Joy, Plant is trying to follow up not just his own rock-legend career, but an unusually successful foray into roots/alt.country music, and the temptation is to judge this new album by those standards.

I’ll resist as best I can, because I think that way lies unfairness.

Band of Joy, I suspect, will appeal more to those who were fans of Plant’s unledded period than it will to those who are out and out roots fans or who come to this album via Raising Sand.

Tracks one and three — ‘Angel Dance’, ‘Central Two-O-Nine’ — could almost come from that 1994 unplugged album, and I even found myself kind of wishing that Jimmy Page was there playing guitar. The same could be said for track 11, ‘Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down’, a kind gospelly blues with gorgeous harmonies.

Beyond that, though, the material is straight from that netherworld of fifties-tinged rock n’ roots that distinguished Raising Sand, though I have to say I think the production here misses the magic touch of T-Bone Burnett.

Still, the band is fantastic, and I really do love the guitar sounds they get. Having said that, the actual playing is pedestrian: none of it sizzled in the way I would expect. There was none of the blistering precision you associate with bluegrass nor even slower stuff that might give you an achy-breaky heart.

Which is another way of saying that Buddy Miller is a bit wasted here and I wonder why that might be. (Though it’s worth bearing in mind that Buddy Miller at his least impressive is still better than ninety percent of the competition.)

But Plant’s vocals are up to standard and his voice works well with Patty Griffin. By and large I think they’ve chosen/written good songs, the only real exception to my ears being ‘Cindy, I’ll Marry You Someday’. Not a fan of the original and this version brings nothing much to the table.