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(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Throughout his career, Robert Plant has always been guided by an undimmed enthusiasm for where, in his estimation, music’s burning with the most vitality across rock and pop’s ever-evolving climate.
Such creative intuitions were well sharpened when fronting the Led Zeppelin monster. Across their 1970s heyday, all members of the group looked to music’s far-flung corners and exotic crannies to brew a string of lauded hard rock LPs that would subsume folkloric mysticism, rootsy blues stomp, and proto-metal heft, scoring each album’s window into a truly transportive, multi-dimensional ether every bit as alluring as Houses of the Holy’s chromatic, alien terrain.
Despite being lauded as one of the archetypal rock frontmen, Plant was never going to lapse into self-parody. After Led Zeppelin’s breakup in 1980, a string of shinier solo LPs typical of the era would mark an artist eager to shake off expectations, leaning more comfortably into his sound by the decade’s end. What followed for the next 30-odd years was a run of projects and band ventures that all served as noble outlets for his ever intrepid tastes.
Alongside the high-profile double-up with Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, Plant would chart a course straight for the hearts of Americana, cutting a respectable bluegrass collaboration with singer Alison Krauss, and pour his fascination with African and Middle-Eastern rhythms into his Sensational Space Shifters ensemble.
Always paying attention, Plant’s ear to the musical ground makes the restless singer a good source of curatorial advice for any crate digger. Swinging by the Nonesuch Records’ New York office, Plant took part in their ‘Selects’ YouTube series, rifling through their vinyl collection and picking out the albums that he feels deserve a spotlight. Pointing out LPs from Kronos Quartet, Neba Solo & Benego Diakité, and Charlie Feathers, among others, Plant bestows particular high praise toward a relatively recent effort in the world of modern country and blues.
“Now, The Low Anthem, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin,” Plant exalts enthusiastically. “Charlie Darwin was born and raised like 20 miles from where I live. And quite a character, obviously changed the world, but this record also changed my world. I found it to be inspiring, and at a particular time when I was looking for clues to try and break the mould of my previous time, I was absolutely taken by this.”
Hailing from England’s Shrewsbury, near Plant’s Shatterford village residence in the West Midlands, Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection did indeed change the world, and also found himself a conceptual presence on The Low Anthem’s third album.
Described as “a gospel record for scientists and social philosophers” by band co-founder Ben Knox Miller, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin scores the tensions between faith and the fraught interpretations of the ‘survival of the fittest’ analysis of biology, all set to a rustic and rousing stomp of folk spirituals and barnyard harmonica stomp.
The album was met with acclaim, but no fandom came as close to Plant’s effusive celebration of The Low Anthem’s 2008 offering, crediting the Rhode Island indie folk outfit with ushering a period of creative renewal in his long and chequered solo career.
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