Robert Plant, proudly, moves too jarringly and quickly to ever want to be accused of evolution, but that is what he’s done on the (expectedly) difficultly titled lullaby and... THE CEASELESS ROAR. Look, we all know Plant’s obsession with fevered creativity means he will produce different for different’s sake, so there’s a lot of weirdness on this record that uses odd where traditional would work fine too. But we love him for that and given that the guy’s ten kinds of old school, it’s usually a Tom Waits weirdness he slathers onto what in many cases here could be straight folk rock songs. Okay, back to the evolution, lullaby—in couched, brief (trite?) terms—is part Raising Sand, part Zep III, part world music, and, both personified and delivered by his intellectual British band, part hill and dale Welsh coffee house folk, say, sorta alt.Waterboys. So there’s rhythm tracks with no cymbals (you know, that whole “take away the drummer’s cymbals” challenge), all manner of odd percussion whacker, obscure stringed instrument, woodwinds from olden tymes. These guys are perfect for Robert (but the immense Francis Dunnery would have been too, but not Robbie Blunt), and one can envision the meetings: “I want nobody coasting here; you guys do what you do, but here’s the precious brief.” And then Robert pulls out a map of the world and puts down different size flags all over the place (see above). The big clinic turns out to be textures, and the record can be listened to just for that, although, I swear, you will be constantly checking to see if you errantly had turned your treble off along the way, even if that’s just to cream everything together. And the singing is a joy as well. I still miss that crazy wonton guy on Walking Into Clarksdale (the lost Zep album), but then again, if Plant wigged out over such daring arrangements, it would be all too much. No, so what he does is croon precisely and meditatively. When you have this tool of your arsenal of five or six, and it’s working fine at 66 whereas other guises might now be going extinct in your throat, it would be a shame not to use it and use it often. It’s a unique, celebrated, classic and dependable sound and as a listener you never worry it’s gonna fail, so there it is enjoyable in the same plush and lush recline as the dreamy musical tracks made by his Mensa men. And yes, his skunk works of a band is key, for what they’ve woven is a lattice work comprised of Robert’s vision—twisted, quieted resonances of blues, folk and African music—imbued by their own complicated and composite pasts as post-punk people many times removed and, like Robert, quieted. Ergo, it’s a team striving hard to create the exotic, but posing for themselves the challenge to do so with musical signatures which in many cases are decades and hundreds of years old.