Robert Plant & The Sensational Space Shifters
Album: lullaby and…The Ceaseless Roar
Label: Nonesuch
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.robertplant.com

Plant's latest venture marks his return to the UK after several years in the States absorbing Americana, signalled by a triumphant appearance at this year's Glastonbury Festival with his oh so aptly named band The Sensational Space Shifters. Actually, this lineup is not dissimilar to his Strange Sensation band of a decade or so back, comprising a superficially disparate collection of musicians seemingly plucked at random from various musical ambits but gelling together amazingly well and providing a really impressive foil for Plant's voice while each band member contributes some unbelievably tasty (and seriously pertinent) solos or interjections.

Justin Adams remains Plant's chief collaborator, again in the company of Liam Tyson, John Baggott and Billy Fuller, while Dave Smith replaces Clive Deamer on the drum set, and master Gambian griot Juldeh Camara is brought in as an integral part of the dynamic, playing the Fula one-string fiddle (the riti) and two-string lute (kologo). All but one of the album's 11 songs are Plant originals, and each maintains a distinctive driving (and compulsively driven) groove, but shifts its space and shape during its brief timespan, often quite bewilderingly yet always with its own internal logic and a trance-like sense of inevitability in its unerring sense of direction. Perhaps the most striking example of this heady collision of cultures is Embrace Another Fall, whose pounding beats usher in first cascading distorted guitar figures including a blistering solo and then a female voice (guest Julie Murphy) ethereally intoning a Welsh text which sets in relief Plant's own lyric that revolves around the disintegration of a relationship (clearly, his own with singer Patty Griffin). This is an album where Plant recognises his own past in all its aspects, celebrating and reflecting on his musical predilections with weird Moroccan and Middle Eastern flavourings dipping in and out, nomadically transmogrified Appalachian folk stylings (the discordantly banjo-flecked Poor Howard, loosely derived from a Leadbelly number, and Little Maggie), spinning tribal, acid-house and clattery funk beats, and decisive echoes of former Zepp glories - an insistent semi-recalled Physical Graffiti riff here perhaps (Turn It Up), a sly paraphrase ("And if the sun refuse to shine", originally from Thank You, which opens Pocketful Of Golden) there, but never with any sense of self-parody or cheap plagiarism. There's a brilliant ambience of only-just-controlled chaos about the closing Arbaden whose crashing guitars and thudding drum syncopations offset Plant's oblique, enigmatic lyric and Camara's counterpoint vocal (in Fulani). And in the midst of it all, Plant offers up a passionate and sensitive piano-led confessional ballad A Stolen Kiss (whose lyric contains the disc's title), with the unbearably tender light and shade in his voice cradled in a truly sumptuous instrumental cocoon. There's reassurance too in the beautifully incandescent, aromatic elegy House Of Love (a different song to its Clarksdale namesake, by the way) and the genial Byrdsy jangle of Somebody There.

The overall production is slightly opaque, with a grungy textured feel not dissimilar to that created by Daniel Lanois; there's also a slight sense of the unfinished about tracks like Up On The Hollow Hill which kindof peter out before their time. I also despair somewhat with the typographical quirkiness of the album's title phrase! But in the final analysis lullaby and…The Ceaseless Roar proves a vital, riveting and ecstatic experience wherein the listener is privileged to commune with what Plant terms the blue note inside his soul.

David Kidman