Robert Plant Lullaby And... The Ceaseless Roar

Returning to his native England after an extended sojourn in America, Robert Plant heavily reconnects with his homeland's mysticism on 2014's lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar. Despite the shift in geography, the singer is picking up a thread he left hanging with 2010's Band of Joy. On that album, Plant blurred boundaries between several musical styles, playing covers with a group assembled by producer Buddy Miller, but here he shifts that omnivorous aesthetic to a collection of originals performed with his ever-changing band the Sensational Space Shifters. Certain flourishes sound familiar - he remains equally enamored of English and Moroccan folk while retaining an enduring obsession with American blues and psychedelia - but the feel is different, not as robust as Band of Joy or warmly joyous as Raising Sand…

Returning to his native England after an extended sojourn in America, Robert Plant heavily reconnects with his homeland's mysticism on 2014's lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar. Despite the shift in geography, the singer is picking up a thread he left hanging with 2010's Band of Joy. On that album, Plant blurred boundaries between several musical styles, playing covers with a group assembled by producer Buddy Miller, but here he shifts that omnivorous aesthetic to a collection of originals performed with his ever-changing band the Sensational Space Shifters. Certain flourishes sound familiar - he remains equally enamored of English and Moroccan folk while retaining an enduring obsession with American blues and psychedelia - but the feel is different, not as robust as Band of Joy or warmly joyous as Raising Sand…

Returning to his native England after an extended sojourn in America, Robert Plant heavily reconnects with his homeland's mysticism on 2014's lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar. Despite the shift in geography, the singer is picking up a thread he left hanging with 2010's Band of Joy. On that album, Plant blurred boundaries between several musical styles, playing covers with a group assembled by producer Buddy Miller, but here he shifts that omnivorous aesthetic to a collection of originals performed with his ever-changing band the Sensational Space Shifters…

On Mighty Rearranger, the core of the band Robert Plant showcased on 2002's Dreamland - and named the Strange Sensation - is a full-blown expanded lineup that shares the bill with him. Guitarists Justin Adams and Skin Tyson, drummer Clive Deamer, keyboardist John Baggot, and bassist Billy Fuller help Plant give listeners his most musically satisfying and diverse recording since, well, Led Zeppelin's Physical Grafitti. The reference is not a mere platitude to Plant's pedigree. The songs, production, and sequencing of the album overtly incorporates those sounds as well as those of Eastern modalism, Malian folk, guitar rock, R&B, and others, for inspiration - and why shouldn't they? Mighty Rearranger opens with "Another Tribe," a sociopolitical ballad that touches upon the textural string backdrops from Zep's "Kashmir" and is fueled by Moroccan bendir drums…

For all of the acclaim it received, there's no denying that No Quarter was a tentative reunion for Page & Plant, containing only a handful of new songs that were scattered among many reworked old favorites. Since its supporting tour went well, the duo decided to make their reunion permanent, setting to work on an album of entirely new material. Taking the world music dabblings of No Quarter as a cue, Page & Plant tempered their eclecticism with a healthy dose of their monolithic guitar army, hiring Steve Albini, the indie rock producer notorious for his harsh, brutal recordings, to helm the boards. In other words, it sounds perfect on paper - groundbreaking veteran artists still taking chances and working with younger collaborators who would challenge them…

At their best, cover albums have a strange way of galvanizing an artist by returning to the songs that inspired them; the artists can find the reason why they made music in the first place, perhaps finding a new reason to make music. Robert Plant's Dreamland - his first solo album in nearly ten years and one of the best records he's ever done, either as a solo artist or as a member of Led Zeppelin - fulfills that simple definition of a covers album and goes beyond it, finding Plant sounding reinvigorated and as restless as a new artist. Part of the reason why this album works so well is that he has a new band – not a group of supporting musicians, but a real band whose members can challenge him because they tap into the same eerie, post-folk mysticism that fueled Led Zeppelin III, among other haunting moments in the Zep catalog…

Sixty Six to Timbuktu has to be the icing on the cake for Robert Plant. After Led Zeppelin issued its second live album as well as a spectacular DVD in 2003, his career retrospective outside of the band is the new archetype for how they should be compiled. Containing two discs and 35 cuts, the set is divided with distinction. Disc one contains 16 tracks that cover Plant's post-Zep recording career via cuts from his eight solo albums. Along with the obvious weight of his former band's presence on cuts like "Tall Cool One," "Promised Land," and "Tie Dye on the Highway," there is also the flowering of the influence that Moroccan music in particular and Eastern music in general would have on him in readings of Tim Hardin's "If I Were a Carpenter," Jesse Colin Young's "Darkness, Darkness," and his own "29 Palms." There is also a healthy interest in technology being opened up on cuts from Pictures at Eleven and Now & Zen…

Band of Joy was the name of Robert Plant’s Black Country psychedelic folk group of the late ‘60s and his revival of its name and spirit in 2010 is of no small significance. Certainly, it’s an explicit suggestion that Plant is getting back to his roots, which is true to an extent: the original Band of Joy was unrecorded outside of a handful of demos, so there is no indication of whether this 2010 incarnation sounds anything at all like the ‘60s band but the communal vibe that pulsates throughout this album hearkens back to the age of hippies as much as it is an outgrowth of Raising Sand, Plant’s striking duet album with Alison Krauss. Such blurred borders are commonplace on Band of Joy, where American and English folk meld, where the secular and sacred walk hand in hand, where the past is not past and the present is not rootless…

Robert Plant opens Carry Fire with "The May Queen," a song that can't help but stir up memories of "Stairway to Heaven," the most mystical number Led Zeppelin ever cut. "The May Queen" doesn't sound a thing like "Stairway to Heaven," which is deliberate. As Plant murmurs about "the dimming of his light," the churning folk-rock – a rootless, restless gypsy hybrid of American, English, and Middle East traditions – comes to crest upon a violin line that appears to quote "Prodigal Son," a gospel blues attributed to Robert Wilkins. It's hard not to read this as a sly wink to the audience, a suggestion that Plant, after years of rambling, has returned to where he belongs.