Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, Montreal, Canada, July 07, 2023.
Review by Andy Hughes.
Playing to a sold-out three-thousand audience must feel like a small bar gig to Robert Plant, given the size and scale of venues he has dominated in his previous incarnation of Rock-God-To-The-Masses with Led Zeppelin.
Now in his early seventies, a little thicker around the middle, and with the rather greyer leonine hair under control with a bobble, Plant remains an utterly compelling stage presence, while the accompanying musicians bear not the faintest resemblance to his former partners-in-mayhem.
Long gone is the skipping, jumping, posing and strutting that made Plant one of the most recognisable rock vocalist archetypes in music history. Today, he is firmly and respectfully an ensemble musician, paying rapt attention to the stage work of his fellow musicians, and a quasi-romantic adoration of his fellow vocalist Alison Krauss, whose ethereal visual presence is at odds with the underplayed muscularity of her vocal delivery.
Now rightly acknowledged as one of the most diverse and musically curious artists performing in the world, a fact underlined with a wonderfully eclectic recorded back catalogue, it is Plant’s musical association with Bluegrass legend Alison Krauss that has brought them both an entirely new audience, a massively anticipatory section of which are crowded into this wonderful concert venue.
Reunited here in Montreal, as part of the Montreal Jazz Festival, Robert Plant demonstrates the musical clairvoyance contained in the Led Zeppelin IV album, by including three of its songs in the set, all beautifully re-woven into the band’s current Americana musical settings. Particularly memorable is the re-timing of the frantic Rock And Roll, and Krauss’s ghostly evocation of the late Sandy Denny’s second vocal on The Battle Of Evermore.
Robert Plant’s security in his status as an elder statesman of rock is cemented in his choice of songs for this evening. Out of fifteen songs, only one is of his solo composition, and well over half the remainder are cover versions of songs by artists Plant admires and whose influence have shaped his career, both past and future.
Vocally, the harmonies of Plant and Krauss are even more glorious live than they are on record, with hints of Plant’s legendary blues howl bubbling up alongside Krauss’s atmospheric Appalachian violin work during the Plant Page song Please Read The Letter.
The band’s treatment of the Zeppelin tour-de-force When The Levee Breaks is nothing less than masterful, as twin violins soar over a bed of ominous percussion and thundering guitar, bringing a simultaneous ‘blast from the past’ and a clever notch-up in the concert dynamics and atmosphere.
Elsewhere, Plant’s love of sixties legends The Everly Brothers is given ample attention, with three of their songs being included in the set, a rousing Gone Gone Gone ramping up the atmosphere of audience ecstasy even further as the evening ends.
It’s clear that the entire band, of which Plant and Krauss are definitely an integral part, are thoroughly enjoying being back together and playing shows, hopefully they will continue to do so for a long time.