Robert Plant
Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar
(Nonesuch)
Many are the long-haired rockers of yesteryear cashing in on playing tired versions of their long-haired hits of yesteryear. But Robert Plant, the iconic voice of Led Zeppelin, is hardly content to drag out “Black Dog” for the 8,000th time. Plant has long been an active and adventurous musician post-Zeppelin, in recent years collaborating with Americana musicians in his Band of Joy.
Wiht Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar, Plant not only offers a credible turn as a current innovator, he blows the doors off the sucker. The lead-off tune is “Little Maggie,” an old bluegrass tune from the ’40s. With it, Plant sets expectations for the rest of the album, offering a very un-bluegrass excursion with trippy, looping beat, banjo, and pulsing electronic sounds, all of it crescendoing with a gorgeous bowed-string solo played on a Gambian instrument called the ritti. The result brings new meaning to the word “catchy.” That song returns to close the album with a wildly successful remix that sounds like a dub blend of musical traditions Caribbean, African, American, and rock pureed to within an inch of its life.
In between, you’ll find Plant’s originals. They’re united by his laidback vocal delivery and, often, a droning, comfortable bed of sound in which all sorts of unexpected sounds might surface. If there’s anything of Zeppelin here, it harkens from the slow build of “Kashmir” or the playfulness of “D’yer Mak’er.”
The term “post-rock” gets thrown around as a near-meaningless catch-all, but Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar may at last have brought a chance to inject some meaning into it. Here, one of the biggest voices in the history of rock ’n’ roll has taken his chosen genre and twisted it into something that can only be described by combinations and qualifiers. This is Americana by way of the Sahara, British rock sent through a dub warp, and world music given a nearly symphonic majesty. Even if you’re a Zeppelin naysayer, don’t dismiss Plant. This is a magnificent album, the work of an adventurous rock icon whose explorations have offered him a rich and masterful new music to inhabit.
