Nick Bollinger contemplates the post-rock-god grace of Robert Plant.
Robert Plant Photo: supplied
Being a rock god is a hard affliction to recover from. What looks glamorous in your twenties just doesn’t sound – not to mention look – quite so sensible once you get up into your forties, fifties, sixties, or seventies. If you had asked me, in the days immediately after Led Zeppelin, what Robert Plant’s chances of recovery were, I’d have said, not good.
Yet at 69, the old Worcestershire wailer is doing a better job than perhaps any of his contemporaries at ageing with some modicum of grace.
Carry Fire Photo: supplied
Carry Fire is the eleventh album of Plant’s post-rock-god career, and it’s an album that befits his age and experience. It doesn’t strike undignified poses, or try to recapture a bygone youth.
And yet in its potpourri of styles, there’s little here that Plant wasn’t already working with in his Zeppelin days. He has long had a fascination with the music of Morocco and North Africa, and there’s plenty of Morrocc’n’roll here.
With a dark, circular guitar riff and a pounding artillery of drums, ‘Bones Of Saints’ comes closest to approximating the thunderous appeal of Led Zeppelin. But where Zeppelin would have made a monolith out of it, here the riff is more hinted at than hammered home, and it matches Plant’s voice, which is obviously no longer capable of the banshee cries that were once its speciality.
But if Plant has lost his old freakish range, there are other qualities about his singing these days that are better than ever. ‘Season’s Song’ revisits the pastoral folk sound, somewhere between Appalachia and Anglicana, that Zep sometimes toyed with. Plant’s now weathered tones seem to give it more depth and meaning, especially when he sings of the changing seasons. It’s not the only song here that mines that metaphor for age, or harks back almost wistfully to music that perhaps meant something else to him in his youth.
Plant may not be the strutting rooster he once was, yet this latest music is far from sexless. There’s a sensuous delight that drips from his voice in a track like ‘Keep It Hid’, and it’s matched to a slinky ethnic-electronic groove far sexier than anything in the Zeppelin canon.
He also pays homage to early rock’n’roll, explicitly in the album’s one cover: a version of rockabilly obscurity Ersel Hickey’s ‘Bluebirds Over The Mountain’, sung in a fuzzy electro-rock duet with Chrissie Hynde. ‘50s rock is channelled even more directly in the song he calls ‘A Wall and Not A Fence’ – though the satirical-political lyric shows he’s well aware of what year it is.
Maybe it’s still only rock’n’roll, but Robert Plant’s singing has acquired an almost devotional quality. You sense that, more than anything else, it’s the pure act of singing these days that he lives for. And on Carry Fire he engages in that act with more grace than one could rightfully expect from a recovering rock god.
Carry Fire is available on Nonesuch records
