CD Review: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Raising Sand

As an avid Led Zeppelin fan, I have tried to follow the careers of it’s members over the years. I have bought albums such as ‘Honeydrippers’, ‘Outrider’, ‘Walking into Clarksdale’ and ‘Manic Nirvana’ amongst others. And I must say that none have ever been as satisfying as the tremendous back-catalogue that Led Zeppelin have.

 

Also, I have a couple of Alison Krauss and Union Station (AKUS) albums which are enjoyable blue-grass offerings. Therefore this specific musical partnering appealed to me the moment I heard of it. Of course I was a little anxious, as I have felt let down by Robert Plant before, but as the rave reviews came in, I felt more and more confident that this would be a worthwhile purchase. But I was a little concerned that I would be getting a full CD’s worth of ‘Battle of Evermore’ style keening. While a fantastic song in the context of the Led Zeppelin album, I had my doubts about this being bearable for a whole albums worth of songs (I have enough issues with some of the neighbourhood cats on my garden wall).

 

My next problem was finding it at a decent price in South Africa. It seemed to be priced at least 10% higher than any other current/chart CD in the shops that I visited, and that offended my principles of the moment (hee hee). Then I noticed recently that it was going for half-price in on-line retail shops like Amazon, and my mind was made up. That’s the story on why I took so long to buy it!

 

The first good news is that it is not as I imagined – namely not ‘Battle of Evermore’ keening throughout. While Robert and Alison do sing together on a lot of the songs, there are just as many where Robert takes the lead, or Alison takes the lead with the other performing backing only. This means that there is plenty of variety. Another point is that the pace is rather slow. There are one or two up-beat songs, but it is largely a pretty laid-back album.

 

What comes through though is a pair of voices that nearly perfectly compliment each other, a solid bunch of musos backing this all up, and the production standards of T-Bone Burnett. I would say that the music is dreamy, smooth, beautiful, down to earth and warm. Overall, if one wanted to classify it, I suppose that one could say ‘Country’.

 

Making a reappearance from Plant is ‘Please Read The Letter’, that also appeared on ‘Walking into Clarksdale’, and I suppose that people are still not reading his letters. Since you’re asking, I will say that I prefer this version of the song but I really wish someone would read the damn letter now. The overall feeling about this album is that Plant sounds a lot better than he has for a while. Not everything is highly original. Songs are covered, the style is old, but amazingly it is one of the freshest sounding offerings that I have heard this year. I hope that they do another one!