Seven years ago, two equal and opposite forces clashed in the musical life of Robert Plant. In October 2007 the singer released Raising Sand, a landmark album with bluegrass artist Alison Krauss that scooped five Grammy awards. This million-plus-selling record secured the idea that Plant was a living artist rather than an old rock god. Raising Sand found 70s music's most lust-crazed screamer crooning. He's doing that again on his latest album, Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar. Raising Sand found this aficionado of the blues kicking up some dust, exploring the roots of Americana. He does that again here on songs such as Little Maggie, Plant's elliptical take on an Appalachian folk song, one originally tackled during the sessions for Raising Sand.
In December of 2007, Plant's other concern, Led Zeppelin, also played their first gig in 27 years. Since then, the clamour for a Zeppelin reunion tour has throbbed along like a bassline. Plant has continued chasing his own muse. 2010's Band of Joy album, another elegant work of searching Americana, found him in the company of Patti Griffin, with whom Plant set up home in Austin, Texas.
Now, in the face of renewed reunion static, Plant is releasing a candid and tender break-up album. The remastering of Led Zeppelin's back catalogue this summer redoubled the clamour for fresh Zep activity, and added sniping in the press as a new, high-frequency counterpoint. Page is "fed up" with Plant's refusal to tour. Plant countered recently that he wanted to do new acoustic music with Page, but Page "walked away".
Pointedly, Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar turns inwards. It also turns its back on nearly a decade of American adventuring. Plant's relationship with Griffin is over, and he's back at home, exploring native landscapes. Those coming to Plant fresh from his Nashville period may find themselves a little dislocated by these trance-like grooves, combining Celtic tones with west African rhythms (Juldeh Camara on riti, a one-stringed fiddle, and the kologo, a two-stringed lute, is a key band member). But Plant and his foil, Justin Adams (guitars, djembe, bendirs and tehardant (three-string lute), have been in these spaces before – notably on 2005's Mighty Rearranger – only never before with such refinement. Embrace Another Fall starts with strings plucked in west Africa, while Plant's melody recalls a folk lament before a growling guitar solo throws the song's axis further west. Words like "your heart could not foresee the tangle I became/ That brings me home again" point openly to Plant's split from Griffin.
Plant's lifelong love affair with America, meanwhile, takes a battering on Turn It Up, a terrific three-legged blues noir that recalls Tom Waits. here's a Roy Orbison tremble to A Stolen Kiss, and a commitment to quietude, inspired by the Minnesota band Low – but Plant is keen to chisel away at that touchstone. Poor Howard is derived from Leadbelly's Po' Howard, on west African analogues to banjos and fiddles. And there are songs here that acknowledge Plant's own ancient history. "If the sun refused to shine," begins Pocketful of Golden, quoting Thank You off Led Zeppelin II. On Turn It Up, the road "remains the same". It's hard to tell whether this is Plant teasing, or connecting threads, or both. Whatever the truth, his bloody-minded refusal to countenance that Zeppelin reunion continues to yield beguiling new directions.
