Robert Plant & Saving Grace reviewed: a new fellowship and a new quest for the Zeppelin frontman

The only thing to do is to come home

From West Midlands clubs to cavernous American stadiums, from the wasted land of the Sahara to the glitz of Nashville – not to mention the darkest depths of Mordor and over the hills where the spirits fly – Robert Plant has been on quite the journey. When globe-trotting gets old, though, the only thing to do is to come home.

Plant’s new album, his first with his current group Saving Grace, is a return to the promised land, located somewhere around Kidderminster and the Wyre Forest. It’s a reconnection for Plant with the musicians of the region, and a rediscovery of some of the songs of his youth. It also revitalises his craft, if that were needed.

Saving Grace’s start was inauspicious, probably just how the low-key Plant would like it: he met stringed-instrument master Matt Worley in a pub, where the pair bonded over The Incredible String Band, Dave Swarbrick and Sandy Denny, before Worley introduced the singer to guitarist Tony Kelsey. The rest of the group, mostly local players, soon slotted into place.

Plant would rather his name wasn’t even on the album cover

Over the last 20 years, Plant has become a disciple of harmony singing, learning from his collaborative work with Alison Krauss on 2007’s Raising Sand and 2021’s Raise The Roof, and with Patty Griffin on 2010’s Band Of Joy. Saving Grace is no different, except that Suzi Dian is Plant’s first English singing partner. At times gliding and honey-sweet, at others jaggedly melancholic, her voice is perhaps the finest partner to Plant’s since Sandy Denny tackled “The Battle Of Evermore” at Olympic Studios in early 1971.

The group started touring in February 2019, playing small shows to try out material without the pressure of crystallising their art in the studio. It was, you might imagine, like the good old days. Saving Grace’s leader is a man who could be selling out stadiums, presenting the songs of Led Zeppelin at the Las Vegas Sphere with immersive Tolkien-inspired visuals, but instead he quite brilliantly chooses to play the Leeds HiFi Club, Dorking Town Hall, Newtown Theatr Hafren. This is a man who’d prefer to disappear into the stage curtains of the Wimborne Minster Tivoli Theatre and allow the other musicians to shine. Pyrotechnics be damned, a backdrop of a bison will do just fine. Plant would rather his name wasn’t even on the album cover if it weren’t for the commercial benefits.

In these mainly smaller venues over the last six years (global pandemic allowing), the group’s sets have included Zeppelin tunes – usually “Four Sticks”, “Gallows Pole”, “Ramble On” or “The Rain Song” – alongside a host of covers that don’t appear on their debut album: Neil Young’s “For The Turnstiles”, the traditional “The Cuckoo”, the Bahamian closing section of The Incredible String Band’s “A Very Cellular Song”, “Crawling King Snake” as channelled by John Lee Hooker.

Middle Eastern banjo riffs scurrying over growls of baritone guitar

From this wealth of material, their debut album takes 10 songs, tracked in a Cotswold barn and then mostly redone on the Welsh borders when the barn sessions proved a little too rough fidelity-wise. Half of the material consists of traditional or blues numbers, a couple are taken from Plant’s ’60s enthusiasms and a few more from his more recent favourites. It all begins with “Chevrolet”, and Worley’s banjo, a crucial texture on the album: slightly overdriven, with no hokey American ersatz, and closer in sound to its African antecedents. Co-written by Memphis Minnie – who of course also penned “When The Levee Breaks” – and later adapted by Donovan for “Hey Gyp (Dig The Slowness)”, it’s a classic blues, but Saving Grace turn it into something droning and stranger. Even as Plant and Dian repeat their devotional promises to “just do something for you girl”, the mood is minor-key and a little threatening.

“As I Roved Out”, a traditional folk song inspired by Sam Amidon’s 2013 arrangement, is darker still and utterly thrilling. The drums are almost martial, the guitars ominous, and strange drones cluster at the edges of the sound. It’s subtle and captivating at the same time, especially when the singers take a solo verse before the music comes crashing back in, Middle Eastern banjo riffs scurrying over growls of baritone guitar.

The primmest folk song here, “I Never Will Marry”, foregrounds the massed harmonies of Plant, Dian and Worley, backed only by drifts of Kelsey’s echoed electric guitar, sounding very much like Alan Sparhawk’s work with Low (more on them soon). The closing spiritual “Gospel Plough” is a tender, smouldering thing, and one of the handful of tracks that could sit comfortably on Raising Sand.

There’s no clearer demonstration of Plant’s humility

The group also tackle more modern material. Plant delves back into his own youth for a gorgeous, plaintive take on “It’s A Beautiful Day Today” from Moby Grape’s ’69 album, and zoom into the 21st century with The Low Anthem’s “Ticket Taker”, Martha Scanlan’s “Higher Rock” and Sarah Siskind’s “Too Far From You”. The latter pair are led by Dian, with Plant skilfully providing backing vocals and occasional lead lines. Likewise, their take on Blind Willie Johnson’s rolling blues “Soul Of A Man” is sung by Worley, in a voice not unlike Plant’s, while he and Dian interject with keening backing vocals. There’s no clearer demonstration of Plant’s humility, or of his enthusiasm for being in a proper group.

While these blues, folk and country moments are excellent, the most striking offering on Saving Grace is its most primal, namely their savage version of Low’s “Everybody’s Song”. Though recorded with mainly acoustic instruments, led by the Latin American cuatro, it somehow matches – or even surpasses – the apocalyptic mood of the Duluth band’s feedback-strafed original. Plant has now covered three songs from Low’s 2005 album The Great Destroyer – just wait until he discovers their 12 other LPs – but this is no pale tribute. The group twist the verses into 6/8 time to accommodate a vaguely Arabic vibe, but keep the shattered chorus in 4/4. Guttural baritone guitar snakes its way through the song until the musicians slam into a violent stop/start break that echoes the climactic guitar solo in “Whole Lotta Love”.

That was almost 60 years ago, though, and Plant has a different destination in mind, one that Saving Grace seem well equipped to get him to. What they do as a group is far from the sparkle of Plant’s Nashville collaborators or the exotic, ambient textures of the Strange Sensation or the Sensational Space Shifters; this is something darker, sparer, a little more monochrome in sound, a lot more English. These musicians plucked from the local Midlands scene, just as Plant and John Bonham were all those years ago, turn out to be his most powerful outfit in decades. It’s hard to see a limit to their powers, such is their skill with both the sweet and the sour, the delicate and the bruising. Perhaps the only thing that can topple them is Plant’s roving eye, ever seeking new challenges as he moves ceaselessly forward.

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