Jimmy Page replied, when asked in March about the forces preventing a Led Zeppelin reunion from happening: “It’s Robert Plant, isn’t it?” Around the same time, Plant offered a curt “zero” on the chances of his old band getting back together. While Page would like nothing more than to strike the hammer of the gods once more, Plant has spent much of his adult life distancing himself from the most decadent rock’n’roll band of them all.
It’s not that Plant wants to rid himself of the memory of Led Zeppelin — he has been doing a version of Rock and Roll in concerts, albeit one featuring a solo spot from an African one-stringed fiddle — as much as emerge from the shadow of such an overwhelming force. Plant’s biggest post-Zeppelin release to date is 2007’s Raising Sand, an excursion into spacious Americana with the understated singer Alison Krauss. Now comes Lullaby . . . and the Ceaseless Roar, an album that combines everything from Celtic folk to American bluegrass to north African rhythms, slaps all kinds of electronic manipulations over the top and uses the whole mélange as a bed on which to lay Plant’s most personal lyrics to date: old age, loneliness, hopefulness and the realities of love get explored in poetic detail. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it is brave and engaged and, for all its exotic flourishes, rooted in reality.
Led Zeppelin did explore the quieter corners of folk and country when they weren’t busy inventing heavy metal, and Little Maggie, a traditional bluegrass tune about the type of no-good woman who has inspired about half the world’s folk songs, is not a million miles from Zep’s Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You. There the similarity between Led Zeppelin and the solo journey ends, as Plant leaves the golden-god image of his youth to put moments of reflection against music that cherry-picks from around the world. Pocketful of Golden combines Gambian griot music with electronic dissonance, and a touch of Eastern drone, with exquisitely sad words about falling in love with someone you go on to lose. It’s tempting to align lines such as “red hair, raven hair gold like the sun, all of us in motion, moving on and gone” to Plant’s recent split from the singer Patty Griffin, whose hair is indeed red-gold like the sun, but whether the words are personal or not, you feel Plant’s conviction.
Sometimes the throwing-together of styles is overwhelming — it’s a leap to go from Nineties trip-hop to heavy rock to Welsh bardic verse, as the listener must on Embrace Another Fall — but when Plant simplifies things he provides some of the most tender moments of his career. His voice is simply remarkable on A Stolen Kiss, a minor-key piano piece about how “love waits for no one, there’s so little time. It’s cruel and elusive and so hard to find.” You feel that Plant has never revealed himself more, or that his audience will ever get closer to him. However exciting the sight of Plant pretending to be his 25-year-old self and screaming “bay-beh” in too-tight trousers for a Led Zeppelin reunion would be, this is surely a more dignified route for a 66-year-old former golden god to take.
(Nonesuch, out Monday)