Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raising Sand

Artists : Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Title : Raising Sand (2007)

Genre : Easy-Listening (sadly)

Rating : ***** * (out of 10*)

This Week I'm Listening To...
The oddest pairing of genres since ...um, okay it hasn't been all that long... Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler. The voice of Led Zepplin teams up with Bluegrass/Newgrass's leading lady to do covers of 13 songs from various artists such as Tom Waits and the Everly Brothers.

What's To Like...
The voices blend well. Ms. Krauss and Mr. Plant hit every note dead-on. The backing musicians are superb. The studio engineering is first-rate. The whole album is ...well... pleasant.

What's Not To Like...
While the CD is well done, its aspirations are embarrassingly low. Krauss and Plant yawn their way through a bunch of slow songs that pretty much all have one-octave voice ranges in them. The backing music is professionally played, but if you're looking for any Union Station-esque bluegrass or any Zep-rock guitar work, you're going to be disappointed.

The energy level here is grade-A blahsville. The liveliest tracks are 'The Fortune Teller' and 'Nuthin', and even they sound like someone needs to take a couple No-Doze. At least in those two tracks, the backing musicians are allowed to cut loose a little.

It Helps To Have A Short Memory...
There was a Zits cartoon a couple days ago, where Jeremy's dad asks Pierce (Jeremy's metal-headed body-pierced friend) if he ever listens to The Beatles. "Oh, of course!" replies Pierce, "All the time".
"What about Dylan, Led Zepplin and the Stones?"
"Sure!"
The dad walks away, content this his (my) generation has left an indelible stamp on the world of rock-&-roll. After he's gone, Pierce turns to Jeremy and asks, "Why were we talking about elevator music?"

That pretty much sums up Raising Sand. It's a nice album to use as background music when you want to concentrate on reading a good book. But one cringes to think what a young kid might conclude about Led Zepplin and Bluegrass if this is the only album he hears from these two. I'll cut Plant some slack, since he's an old geezer now. But Krauss is fairly young, and there's no excuse for her half-hearted efforts of the past 5 or 6 years.

So we'll give it six stars, which is pretty much my maximum score for easy-listening albums. If you can erase your memories of Led Zepplin and Union Station, then you may give this a higher rating. But if those LZ/US memories still linger, then you're gonna be kinda sad to see how far these two icons have devolved.