Review Summary: A diverse and inventive album that defines Robert Plant's career.
Even in a career that has wound down to its final stage, it’s apparent that Robert Plant simply refuses to stop dreaming.
Lullaby And…The Ceaseless Roar is Plant’s tenth and possibly final album, and it is as daring of a piece as he’s ever written. He may no longer possess the shrill high notes and frenzied shrieks that characterized his earliest days with Led Zeppelin, but that by no means limits his creativity.
Lullaby is filled to the brim with haunting melodies, personal lyrics, and an appetite for invention rarely seen in musicians over 65 years of age.
In the aftermath of Plant’s expansive solo journey to date,
Lullaby And…The Ceaseless Roar feels like a homecoming of sorts. As an album, it is closer to the foggy forested atmospheres of
IV than it is to his synth-pop binge during the 1980’s, or more recently, his bluegrass-country collaboration with Alison Krauss. Just like his whirlwind career, though,
Lullaby And…The Ceaseless Roar takes a wide range of ideas and fuses them into something tangibly original and surprisingly dynamic. ‘Little Maggie’ boasts this accomplishment right off the bat, reworking The Stanley Brothers’ original version with a touch of West African culture. The riti, a one stringed instrument comparable in sound to a high pitched violin, graces an instrumental canvas otherwise composed of avid finger-picking and jaunty, percussive backbeats – thus lending the album a distinct
worldly sensation. ‘Rainbow’ and ‘Pocketful of Golden’ transcend into the
otherworldly, plunging
Lullaby into a gorgeously bleak atmosphere reminiscent in so many ways of Zeppelin’s quieter, more contemplative moments. From any angle, to say that
Lullaby And…The Ceaseless Roar gets off to a commendable start would be a vast understatement.
The album’s chief highlight has to be ‘Embrace Another Fall’ – a sprawling epic that drifts across three different parts of the musical spectrum. First, you have Plant’s trademark utterances, dark and foreboding. Then the song gathers momentum with clashing percussion before culminating in a searing guitar solo that would have made Jimmy Page proud circa
Physical Graffiti. Finally, it comes back down, with guest vocalist Julie Murphy reciting the ancient Welsh folk song ‘Marwnad yr Ehedydd’ to a background of strings and wailing electric guitars. Although it may feel slightly disjointed, its resounding beauty won’t drive you to even attempt to find fault with it. And although the album starts to lose direction a bit after this song, its definitive impact echoes long after the final seconds of
Lullaby have expired – making it the most lustrous of the record’s gems.
The album’s second half is much more of a mixed bag than the first. You’ll find harrowing accounts of loneliness (‘Up On The Hollow Hill’) as well as overly saccharine stabs at crafting a memorable love ballad (‘A Stolen Kiss’). More often than not, Plant’s weaker efforts come on the tracks that glide by without a unique “catch.” On an album full of various cultural and musical tributes, it’s the more straightforward songs that pale in comparison. ‘Somebody There’, for instance, is just your typical, unmemorable mid-tempo rocker. Plant almost sounds uninterested, as if he's just awaiting the song's end like the rest of us are. ‘Arbaden (Maggie’s Baby)’ fails in its aimless pursuit to (yet again) reinvent ‘Little Maggie.’ There's a handful of tracks such as these, and they unfortunately do very little to garner the listener's attention. Sure, the aforementioned ‘Up On The Hollow Hill’ and the pleasantly emotive ‘House of Love’ save the album’s latter half from complete futility, but there’s still no ignoring what
Lullaby And…The Ceaseless Roar could have been.
As a whole, Robert Plant’s tenth solo album is an eclectic musical odyssey that simultaneously marks a return to his Zeppelin-sounding roots. His experience has provided him with a wealth of influence to draw upon, and the way he blends it with more of a 1970’s throwback feel borders on sheer brilliance. It’s a bit front-loaded, and not every track will floor you, but it’s definitely the most summative album of Robert Plant’s career. To fans of rock music everywhere, that should be plenty enough reason to listen. If this ends up being the final chapter in Plant’s legendary career, it will be a fitting close for sure.
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