ROBERT PLANT & ALISON KRAUSS
Raise The Roof
[Warner]
Plant’s restrained country blues vocals and Krauss’s honeyed bluegrass tones sounded like a blissful marriage, and wowed the world on Grammy award-winning covers album, ‘Raising Sand’, back in 2007. On this sequel, the formula is unmodified, the plot unchanged. Producer T Bone Burnett chose 12 country, pop and blues songs for the pair to rework. Drenched in exotic percussion, liquor-blurred guitar, thick southern steam and outbursts of ragged junk blues, it’s a record to follow deep into the bayou. Whether originally jaunty (the Everly Brothers’ ), groove-laden) or fragile (), each song is drawn skilfully into the duo’s dusky landscape. Geeshie Wiley’s rolls in like a Mississippi tugboat. , Bert Jansch’s ode of defiant self-belief, seems to growl from the undergrowth. It’s an album about digging deep into the darkness of the source material.
