Alison Krauss & Union Station
Arcadia
★★★★
DOWN THE ROAD
While she’s been busy with her solo career and her opposites-attract collaboration with Robert Plant, Alison Krauss hasn’t made an album with her colleagues Union Station in 14 years. Yet despite the arrival of IIIrd Tyme Out’s Russell Moore as Alison’s new lead vocal foil, there’s much that’s reassuringly familiar about Arcadia. As ever, the sonic palette is richly clean, the harmonies stacked, and Jerry Douglas’s dobro an empathetic, keening presence in constant dialogue with the singers, now the dominant solo instrument in the ensemble. Krauss and the band have been ploughing this furrow since their Two Highways debut back in 1989, operating intermittently alongside Krauss’s largely more mainstream solo career and weathering together the early 2000s when O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cold Mountain briefly turned bluegrass into a pop phenomenon.
She may have sold 12 million albums, but fame has never turned Krauss’s head – she’s stuck with the musicians and songwriters she encountered as a teenage prodigy on the old-time festival circuit, distilling those roots into a chamber art form while casting herself as a woman of constant sorrow for the 21st century. When she’s with Union Station she’s where she seems most at ease, part of a traditional ensemble in what began as a male-dominated form – her plaintive, crystalline soprano alternating songs with Moore’s high lonesome tenor which evokes what D.H. Lawrence memorably called “the essential American soul… hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”
Krauss has talked of how she channels the past when she sings, drawing on “the good old days when times were bad”. Yet many of the songs she picks here – the opening Looks Like The End Of The Road or One Ray Of Shine – relocate perennial bluegrass themes of loss and travail to the present in contemporary confessions of alienation and paths not taken. “In my life who would believe/The never ending lonely inside of me…” she asks on Robert Castleman and former band member Dan Tyminski’s The Wrong Way, her voice as poignant and fragile as any isolated settler a long way from home. If Krauss soothes and sorrows in her clear-eyed soprano, Moore delivers impassioned and fatalistic folk narratives like Cordelia’s Dad’s arrangement of the traditional Granite Mills, a grim account of the 1874 Fall River fire where 23 women and children died on the sixth floor of a cotton textile mill, before getting a tad frisky on J.D. McPherson’s rousing North Side Gal. Occasionally they swap roles but, overall, Moore anchors the album in a rough-hewn past, while Krauss concludes the album pointing forwards in Jeremy Lister’s closing There’s A Light Up Ahead, assuring us that “she’ll move along, can’t keep on looking backwards.”
Arcadia is out March 28th on Down The Road.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade
Tracklisting
Looks Like The End Of The Road
The Hangman
The Wrong Way
Granite Mills
One Ray Of Shine
Richmond On The James
North Side Gal
Forever
Snow
There’s A Light Up Ahead
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