Listen while your read: Open up the Plant / Krauss “jukebox”

This album involves quite an unexpected team-up. Robert Plant, lead singer of Led Zeppelin, joins one of the most important voices and fiddles in bluegrass music, Alison Krauss. There is a third artist, not mentioned on the cover, who really makes this entire album work so well: T-Bone Burnett. T-Bone Burnett is less known for his own solo work, which is a unique blend of cynical critique with an experimental twist on popular music, and better known for his production. Here he is both producer and musician, as on other albums he has produced (such as the soundtrack for Oh Brother Where Art Thou?).

Although I am not much of a bluegrass man myself, this very well produced and performed album has certainly caught my attention and I’ve been listening to it a lot lately. There are several things that make the album so intriguing (beyond the fact that the lead singer of Led Zeppelin is involved). Perhaps foremost is the variety that is here despite a coherency relating to the genres of bluegrass and American folk. The team performs a range of pieces from the 1950s to the present, including a tune by the Everly Brothers (“Gone gone gone” [1964]), a piece by the Byrd’s Gene Clark (“Polly come home” [1969]), and a remake of a Plant-Page tune, “Please read the letter” (1998).

Although the album sounds quite consistently like bluegrass or folk, there is a nice range of musical styles within this framework, thanks largely to T-Bone Burnett’s work in assembling this band and thanks to his production. Some songs are played solely acoustic (e.g. “Sister Rosetta goes before us”) while others are high on reverb. Some approach rockabilly (“Gone gone gone”) while others have a Celtic feel (“Trampled rose”).

Variety is also there in terms of the vocal focus of each song, with some sung solo by either Plant or Krauss, others as full duets, and still others with one taking the lead while the other backs. The vocal tones of Plant and Krauss blend very well and complement one another in unexpected ways. One rarely hears Plant singing so gently as on this album in tunes like “Killing the blues”, and yet there are others where the vocal range of a Zeppelin album are approached, as in “Fortuneteller”. In “Nothin’”, Plant gently sings a slow-moving tune backed by an unexpected heavy electric guitar and fiddle accompaniment (by Krauss).

There is also humour thrown in at times, as when the innocent-sounding voice of Alison Krauss sings “Let your loss be your lesson” solo:

Once I had myself a good woman
But I just didn’t treat her right
I was always leaving
Living the party life
True love was waiting for me
I was much too blind to see (© Hillgreen Music [BMI]).

The hymn-like “Your long journey” completes the album well with an acoustic sound and banjo — a hymn-singing Robert Plant. The liner notes appropriately joke about teaching an “old dog” new tricks.

The official site for the album is here.

In Rainbows is a very highly produced album with great attention to detail, something that may make reproduction in live shows a trial for the band, I would imagine. The result of this production is a very clean and sharp sound, with percussion, guitar, and other instrumentation often jumping out at the listener in stark ways. Although there’s a bit of ambience as well, it’s hard not to pay complete attention to most tunes on this album when they are playing — this is no music for airports!

Despite having played this album a number of times, I still wonder what’s next as I listen, simply because of the rather non-traditional structures of the songs and the interesting juxtapositions of the different instruments and sounds, both acoustic and electronic, harmonic and dissonant. This is what makes the overall aural experience very intriguing. I sit on the edge of my seat for most tracks on this album, even though I do find the high level of production sometimes lacking in warmth or even emotionally sterile at times (but warmth is not likely what Radiohead was going for on some of these tracks).

The sterility I mentioned may well be intentional. The running lyrical themes of this album, which are also echoed by the music, are futility, darkness, and despair — the end, the singer’s end, is near in just about every tune. If he is not falling off the edge of the earth or going to hell, he’s dead from the neck up or trapped in the prison of his body. The album evokes phantoms and there are times, as in “Nude”, when the vocals are best described as the cries of displaced angels.

When you are listening to “Weird Fishes/Apeggi” it is truly the sounds of the depths that you hear, and Mephistopheles (Satan) is indeed grabbing at you to bring you down to destruction, as in the finale, “Videotape”. Despite the haunting darkness of this album there are moments of light, and the finishing lines suggest that light wins out: “No matter what happens now, I won’t be afraid. Because I know today has been the most perfect day I’ve ever seen.”

There are a number of fast-paced songs here, including “15 Step”, “Bodysnatchers”, and “Weird Fishes / Arpeggi”. It is here that one senses the feel of The Bends at times. The solemn and haunting “15 Step” combines heavy drumming with synthesizers in a sort of sombre harmony. In “Bodysnatchers”, distorted guitar gives way to a whining guitar background reminiscent of tunes on U2′s Achtung Baby.

The slower songs reflect an interesting range of sounds from one track to the next. A highlight of the album, in my view, is “All I need” with its slow cello-like sounds juxtaposed with distorted synthesizers. This gives way to a piano and violin-sounding climax with heavy drumming. Lyrically, here the persona of the singer is a moth trying to get out of the darkness and towards the light, and the music itself suggests some hope in this regard. Also very effective, musically, is “Reckoner”, where the interplay between lead guitar (played as bass) and distant tambourine-like percussion provides the ideal background to the gentle vocal tones that climax in an ambient string orchestral arrangement before returning to the beginning again.

Radiohead’s “Jigsaw” combines acoustic guitar and funky bass in a slow build that leads to a full sound once again more reminiscent of The Bends or OK Computer. Here the statement is made: “What’s the point of instruments. Words are a sawed-off shotgun”. Overall, Radiohead’s In Rainbows proves quite the opposite. It is the rich mix of instrumentation and juxtaposition of various sounds that make it possible to withstand the darkness (or dodge the shotgun) of the album and come out alive. I would recommend this album, as you may have guessed.

Buy the album

Listen while your read: Open up the Springsteen Magic webpage in a new window (then click on a track)

In some ways, Bruce Springsteen’s latest album, Magic, which sees the reuniting of the E. Street Band, comes at a high point in Springsteen’s recent career, and this means there are high expectations. Three recent contributions contribute to these high expectations.

First, just recently Springsteen had a very well done solo album of mostly acoustic-based songs, Devil’s and Dust (2005). In many ways, that album represents Springsteen’s great skill in writing and performing emotionally direct and vivid tunes, and in character sketching (on which see my discussion of Welcome to Asbury Park, N.J.). Second, Magic is also the first E. Street Band album since the very coherent and moving album of 2002, The Rising. That album did an amazing job of looking at a crucial and tragic event, 9/11, from a variety of perspectives without terribly oversimplifying the meaning of events such as that. Third, Magic follows up on the foot-stomping, whisky-drinking tribute album to the folk music of Pete Seeger: We Shall Overcome (2006).

How does the newest album match up to this trio of somewhat diverse contributions? There is a sense in which Magic is The Rising part 2, which is both good and bad. On the one hand, Magic is clearly a solid, well-performed rock album that is superior to most other efforts in this area, and I would therefore recommend it. On the other, there are some ways in which this album does not live up to the high expectations and lacks a coherency in theme when compared to The Rising.

There are a number of lively rock tunes on this album beyond “Radio nowhere”, the first single. “You’ll be comin’ down”, “Livin’ in the future”, “I’ll work for your love”, and “Last to die” are all somewhat fast-paced and well-performed tunes with some nuance. However, there are other upbeat pieces that seem clouded. In particular, “Gypsy biker” is difficult to listen to or discern. I’m all for well-placed, heavy percussion within the overall structure of a song, but in this case the drumming assault seems without meaning and becomes annoying to my ears as the song progresses. Springsteen’s vocals and any other instrumentation begin to disappear in these murky waters. “Last to die” is apparently a song of despair with little hope (other songs supply that) which asks: “Who’ll be the last to die for a mistake. . . Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break. Who’ll be the last to die”.

There are also some slower paced songs that provide limited variety here and highlight the sounds of piano and (yes, this is an E. Street Band album) chimes (which can also be heard on the livelier songs). “Girls in their summer clothes” is an enjoyable series of vignettes of small town life. The title track, “Magic”, is a slow moving (perhaps too slow) dark song, primarily of despair. The highlight among these, in my view, is the final “Devil’s Arcade” with its slow build. Here the partially despairing lyrics are countered by the clearly hopeful overall effect of the music.

As with many Springsteen albums, including The Rising, the lyrics are stories of both despair and hope, because they are stories of real life. Though I have not yet been captured by the poetry in the way I have been with some of the acoustic albums including Devils and Dust, the writing on this album is generally good.

That’s all I’ll say for now, and perhaps I’ll supplement this review as I listen to this album for a longer stretch. Often my opinions change with more listens. Music I don’t like on the first few listens sometimes become my favourite down the road, and vice versa.