ROBERT PLANT & ALISON KRAUSS : RAISE THE ROOF

  1. Quattro (World Drifts In)
  2. The Price Of Love
  3. Go Your Way
  4. Trouble With My Lover
  5. Searching For My Love
  6. Can't Let Go
  7. It Don't Bother me
  8. You Led Me To The Wrong
  9. Last Kind Words Blues
  10. High And Lonesome
  11. Going Where The Lonely Go
  12. Somebody Was Watching Over Me
  13. My Heart Would Know
  14. You Can't Rule Me

Label : Warner Music UK

Release Date : November 19, 2021

Length : 61:14

Review (Humo) : Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie. Waarom moest ik onlangs aan die mysterieuze zin van de Franse dichter en grondlegger van het surrealisme Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870) denken? Omdat ik woorden zocht om op te schrijven hoe mooi ik de niet-vanzelfsprekende samenwerking vond tussen de wijdbeense rocklegende Robert Plant en het schuchtere blauwgrasmeisje Alison Krauss. Hoe ik hun debuutplaat 'Raising Sand' met stijgend plezier grijs heb gedraaid, van de herfst van 2007 tot verleden vrijdag. Want verleden vrijdag was de dag waarop 'Raise the Roof' in mijn leven kwam, de meer dan langverwachte tweede worp van het gulden duo. De titel is Engels voor wanneer voetbalsupporters bijvoorbeeld zo hard joelen dat het dak van de tribune eraf lijkt te gaan. Raise the roof wil, bij uitbreiding, ook weleens zeggen dat iemand van plan is de lat hoger te leggen. Dat hebben Robert & Alison, producer T Bone Burnett en de geweldige backingband (met daarin stergitaristen als Marc Ribot, David Hidalgo en Buddy Miller en vooral de even subtiele als speciale drummer Jay Bellerose!) tenminste geprobeerd, en ze zijn daar mijns inziens ook ruimschoots in geslaagd. Natuurlijk wekt het dozijn alhier gebloemleesde blues-, bluegrass-, rock-, folk- en countrysongs niet meer de stomme verbazing op die 'Raising Sand' met zich meebracht, maar toch is het op 'Raise the Roof' van start tot stop genieten geblazen. En wees maar gerust: de nog altijd duidelijk Keltische kracht van Plants stem gaat hier - song na song, noot na noot, zin na zin - telkens weer een soort mystiek huwelijk aan met het gelijknamige orgaan van Krauss. Uit die diep in Amerikaanse grond gewortelde stem komt continu vloeibaar goud gegleden. Nu The Everly Brothers niet meer bestaan, wegens allebei dood, zijn Robert & Alison samen het laatste officiële engelenkoor dat op aarde actief is. En van de Everly Brothers gesproken: hun late hit 'The Price of Love' wordt via een hoogstpersoonlijke lezing van Krauss een eerste hoogtepunt op 'Raise the Roof', een werkstuk dat overigens geen zwakke momenten kent. Een reeks superieure covers van Merle Haggard ('Going Where the Lonely Go'), Bert Jansch ('It Don't Bother Me'), Betty Harris ('Trouble with My Lover') of de absoluut te ontdekken bluesgodin Geeshie Wiley ('Last Kind Words Blues') en één enkele eigen song ('High and Lonesome') vormen samen een masterclass muziekgeschiedenis. Mensen met talent hebben nu eenmaal een neus (en oren) voor ander talent. Rest mij, met dank aan Isidore Ducasse, alleen nog dit te zeggen: 'Raise the Roof' is zo 'mooi als de toevallige ontmoeting op een dissectietafel van een naaimachine en een paraplu'.

Review (Pitchfork) : Fourteen years after their first collaboration, the unlikely duo reunites for a well-curated selection of covers that spans generations, while adding their fascinating mystique to every one. The success of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' Grammy-winning 2007 record Raising Sand set a lofty bar for their bewitching energy as a duo. Fourteen years later, Raise the Roof maintains their careful simplicity, rising to the challenge of releasing another record of mostly cover songs that are still impactful and original. When their talents are interlaced, Plant and Krauss are masters at dusting off generations-old tracks and making them saunter to a fresh, personal rhythm. Between his Led Zeppelin roots, his love of 1950s doo-wop, and a decades-long passion for Asian and South Asian music, Robert Plant has tried many musical derivatives on for size. Equal parts glimmering golden ringlets and devilish rock'n'roll mystique, his career is one of inarguable expansion and divergence. It was incomplete, however, until a 2004 Lead Belly tribute concert where he met bluegrass singer Alison Krauss, the lifetime Grand Ole Opry member, who, until this year, held the record for most Grammy awards won by a woman, having won her first at age 18. Despite seemingly polarized genre identifications, the pair's "almost telepathic" connection was immediate, first yielding the effulgent Raising Sand. Produced by T Bone Burnett, the collection of 12 covers and one Jimmy Page/Robert Plant original showcased how the two musicians coalesced when venturing into what Plant dubbed the "music of the mountains." Raise the Roof, also produced by Burnett, is the dark and spacey counterpart to Plant and Krauss' first release, with covers that span from modern indie-folk band Calexico to early Delta blues musician Geeshie Wiley. Their cover of Calexico's "Quattro (World Drifts In)," the song that ignited Krauss' desire for a second duo record, suspends Plant and Krauss in a personal nomadic catharsis, delivered with such ardency that it is as if the two penned the track themselves. Similarly, despite the insidious nature of Wiley's "Last Kind Words Blues," Krauss' voice soars above it all, like a sunflower straining towards sunlight. The opposing tones of Krauss and Plant, coupled with Marc Ribot's gentle banjo plucks and Stuart Duncan's hypnotizing mandolin, harkens back to Plant's galvanizing vocal symmetry with his other female duet partner, the immortal folk singer and Fairport Convention frontwoman Sandy Denny, the only guest vocalist on any Led Zeppelin record. Plant and Krauss' rendition of the Anne Briggs classic "Go Your Way" feels like a dark and stormy folkian B-side to Led Zeppelin III's crown jewel "That's the Way," both haunting and divine. The stylistic changes, such as the ebbs and flows of Plant's soft rasp with an emphasized drum beat and sorrowful pedal steel, thoughtfully reinvent the track as a farewell letter that feels miles from the original. Plant is persuasive and comfortable on "Searching for My Love," the softest and most innocent track on this intimately dark record. The bridge's magmatic guitar riffs pair tremendously with his boundless vocals. Written by Burnett and Plant, "High and Lonesome" is the zenith of Raise the Roof, with the weathered energy of a dirt-dusted cowboy boot stomping the stage. The clapping percussion dances the track into a fireside incantation; Plant chants "Will she still be mine?" and "There I must find my love" as if casting a spell, while violins swirl up from the cauldron of his lower register. Plant and Krauss' paralyzing and disquieting reimagination of Appalachian-life raconteur Ola Belle Reed's "You Led Me to the Wrong" continues the record's theme of revealing their darker side. The album falls into a valley of platitudes with the final number, "Somebody Was Watching Over Me." The Brenda Burns cover falls short, with a haphazard piano part and incongruous backing vocals. Raise the Roof should have ended one track sooner, on Merle Haggard and Dean Holloway's "Going Where the Lonely Go." Glinting with Russ Pahl's pedal steel touches, it's Krauss' most empyreal moment, conjuring the lonesome dreamscape imagery simply by her stunning approach as a vocalist. Plant and Krauss remain an unexpected pairing, at least on its face. But what beauty lies beneath. With versions that bend and reshape the originals, they once again leave their imprint on a well-curated songbook that suits their mystical nature. They dig deeper into the corners of American music and by doing so, come up with something far more rare and incisive about its past.

Review (Louder Sound) : Many of the most celebrated collaborations play on their seamless weaving of clashing styles, eras or cultures: Kanye West and Bon Iver; David Byrne and St Vincent; Elvis Costello and The Roots; Run-DMC and Aerosmith. When Robert Plant and Illinois country singer Alison Krauss won a Grammy for their 2007 covers album Raising Sand, however, Plant's restrained country blues vocals and Krauss's honeyed bluegrass tones sounded like a blissful marriage, and wowed the world. Fourteen years on - and thirteen after initial sessions for a follow-up proved unsuccessful - comes this sequel, the formula unmodified, the plot unchanged. Once more helmed by T Bone Burnett, who produced and chose all of the songs to be covered on Raising Sand, Raise The Roof selects 12 more country, Americana, classic pop and blues songs for the pair to rework as crepuscular noir country, to often enthralling effect. Drenched in exotic percussion, liquor-blurred guitar, thick southern steam and outbursts of ragged junk blues, it's another record to follow deep into the bayou, chasing the will-o-the-wisp harmonies. Whether originally jaunty (the Everly Brothers' The Price Of Love), groove-laden (Betty Harris's Trouble With My Lover) or fragile (Sandy Denny's version of Go Your Way), here each song is drawn skilfully into Plant and Krauss's immersive, dusky landscape. Geeshie Wiley's Last Kind Words rolls in like a Mississippi tugboat on the Day Of The Dead, its dark carnival atmospheres enshrouding a sophisticated blues about a father's dying wishes. Go Your Way is all stately rural desolation. It Don't Bother Me, Bert Jansch's ode of defiant self-belief, made freshly pertinent transposed to the social-media age, seems to growl from the undergrowth. According to their mutual inclinations, maudlin underbellies are ruthlessly exposed. Plant's languid take on Bobby Moore And The Rhythm Ace's Searchin' For My Love is imbued with later-life resignation rather than the original's youthful urgency, while Krauss unearths the buried regret in The Price Of Love's key line 'Wine is sweet and gin is bitter, drink all you can but you won't forget her'. It's an album about digging deep into the darkness of the source material rather than raising roofs - witness the descent into poverty, misery and abuse detailed in Aubrie Sellers's unbroken Somebody Was Watching Over Me. But when the duo do cut loose it's blessed light relief, turning Lucinda Williams's Can't Let Go into a forlorn dustyard jive, and giving High And Lonesome a devilish blues charge. From the murk, more magnificence.

Review (The Irish Times) : Whatever else can be said of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, they certainly can't be accused of rushing to cash in on the towering success of their 2007 debut collection, Raising Sand. Fourteen years later the British rock star and latter day Americana evangelist and bluegrass's most acclaimed voice have teamed up again with ace producer T Bone Burnett to make a record of shimmering, often dark, beauty and curatorial wonder. The musical marriage of Krauss (50) and Plant (73) brings together two very disparate talents. As Burnett said in a recent interview: "She's much more pristine, so I think her goal is to get it to a certain level of excellence that you don't really aspire to in the blues. And Robert is the other way: he's loose like the blues. She's much more rehearsed and he's more improvisational; she's much more clean and he's dirty." Krauss recognises this: "And so I think why this really works and sounds so different is because he doesn't change who he is. And I don't change who I am." But the music changes both, creates a third space beyond their instinctive comfort zone marshalled by the ever tasteful Burnett and his outstanding band including guitarists Marc Ribot, Buddy Miller and Bill Frisell. Apparently, the 12 tracks, almost all covers, were chosen after a long process of ideas passing back and forth. They include long-forgotten songs by Calexico, Merle Haggard, Allen Toussaint, The Everly Brothers, Ola Belle Reed, Anne Briggs, Geeshie Wiley, Bert Jansch and more. High and Lonesome, the sole original song, written by Plant and Burnett, strikes an odd note with Plant sounding very much like the Plant of old. That is a minor blemish. The other 11 tracks combine to create a sense of haunted loss, albeit one tinged with beauty. The relatively recent (2002) Calexico song Quattro (World Drifts In) sets the tone: mystery, darkness, loss. The Everly Brothers' The Price of Love becomes a sombre lesson in life, Krauss's crystal clear vocal contrasting with the rich, moody soundscape. Krauss also impresses with Toussaint's Trouble With My Lover, her voice's surprisingly delicious sensuality underscored by Plant's low-key backing vocal and the bubbling inventive arrangement. Krauss's other outstanding performances are on Geeshie Wiley's chilling Last Kind Words, a blues tune that feels as real as when it was written 100 years ago, and Merle Haggard's timeless lament Going Where the Lonely Go. Plant is arguably more low key though he turns in stellar performances on Pop Staples' Somebody Was Watching and Ola Belle Reed's You Led Me To The Wrong while both singers let it rip on Randy Weeks' Can't Let Go. It's a partnership that does indeed raise the roof.