ALISON KRAUSS & UNION STATION
Arcadia (Down The Road)
IN THE PEAK MOMENTS of a particular skill or plan there are always the seeds of the weakness which can undercut that very success. Think Damien Martyn or Virat Kohli playing through the offside, Paul Keating in full rhetorical flow, or Barcelona and Spain playing tiki-taka.
Done well, everything looks brilliant, maybe even unstoppable, and this becomes the signature, sought out and mimicked. But the very same qualities, if slightly out when performed, deployed at the wrong time, or overdone, can reveal a vulnerability, hitherto unnoticed, or put aside, among the displays of brilliance.
On a return to each other and to the studio, something which has been by no means a given in the 14 years since the last record, Alison Krauss & Union Station – well, almost all of the classic lineup – feel as if this break was really no longer than a chance to step out for a drink and a quick bite. The classiness of their playing and their ease with bluegrass principles, the purity of Krauss’s voice and the more obvious power and grain of the male voice (once Dan Tyminski, now Russell Moore), the storytelling that is as likely to tread battlefields of the Civil War and now abandoned towns of the old working poor as it is to ponder the timeless fatalities of love, are all here. And all at a high level of course.
There are songs of tragedy and others of tragedy multiplied, from the opening song and “goodbye to the world that I know” message of Looks Like The End Of The Road, to the tone if not necessarily the lyrics of the (actually more hopeful) closing, There is A Light Ahead. Ballads dominate: characters portrayed not as a mournfully crushed but certainly weighed down or accepting of loss; tempos tending to the slower.
Generally speaking, irrespective of subject matter, when Krauss is singing, the songs lay next to sadness, as in the wind-blown sway of The Wrong Way or the measured trot of Forever; when Moore is leading, energy prickles the surface, not least in the high stepping Snow. And there is the bad-at-love spin around the dancefloor of North Side Gal, which features the voices of bassist Barry Bales and banjo/guitarist Ron Block. Though just to make it clear how silly generalisations are, in Richmond On The James, while Krauss sings of the final thoughts of a soldier who will not be going home, the finger-picking banjo vibrancy of the song, intermittently cut across by Krauss’ violin and Jerry Douglas on lap steel and dobro, is quite electric.
At all times, from the delicacy of There’s A Light Up Ahead to the steeliness of Granite Mills, the defining aspect of Arcadia – as it has been for pretty much all of the Union Station records – is a shininess, a layer of appealing gentleness, what might best be described as prettiness. Most obviously that is in Krauss’ voice, which remains crystal-like yet with such warmth, but that description captures the overall tenor, and why people love what they do.
Mostly I would agree with them too, but I can’t shake the feeling that Arcadia is prettiness that is a little overdone, a gloss which undersells the potential in these songs with anything-but-pretty scenarios. This is a really nice record, but it could have been a more powerful one, emotionally, if there was a bit more grit. If it had felt a bit more dirtied up by the stories in these songs.
But then, you might reasonably ask, would that have taken it away from being an Alison Krauss & Union Station album? Or would it modify in a good way what we think we know of them? Strength and weakness.
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Arcadia is out tomorrow, March 28.
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