Roger's Year in Music 2014, No. 8: Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar, by Robert Plant.

Led Zeppelin never was a go-to band for me, even in its prime. Give me the Who or Deep Purple from that era, in that "heavy" of a genre.

From Led Zeppelin's final years through 2002, I paid almost no attention to the group and its surviving members. Robert Plant's Dreamland album of covers changed that. I saw him open for the Who that summer in Indianapolis, beginning with this:

It's a Bukka White song, one I already knew from an old blues compilation snagged from the library and taped back when I was in junior school, and granted, it doesn't fall very far from the center of the Led Zeppelin canon -- but the arrangement fascinated me. My thinking: Maybe I should pay attention to what Plant was doing, and what's he's done in the 12 years since then is invigorating.

The Led Zeppelin "reunion" at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in 2007 was powerful, but Plant was right to view it as a one-off. He won't be locked into a formula, and if I weren't an atheist, I'd say "God Bless Him" for it. Plant's recent musical explorations are as compelling as any late period rock god's, and more innovative than most.

Over to Stuart Berman at Pitchfork:

So for those who worried Plant was settling into a roots-rock comfort zone post-Raising Sand—a theory reinforced by a move to Austin and reports he would only reunite with Jimmy Page on acoustic material—Lullaby reasserts his sense of globe-trotting adventure while retaining the low-key elegance of his post-millennial output. While the song rarely remains the same for Plant, the methodology does: Really, what he’s doing here stays true to the original spirit of Led Zeppelin—i.e., retrofitting Depression-era folk and blues for contemporary audiences—in a 21st-century globalized, WiFi-accelerated context, bringing together sounds archaic and modern, rustic and exotic, visceral and vaporous. But after years spent reinterpreting the work of others, Lullaby sees Plant stepping up with his first batch of original songs in nearly a decade, answering his band’s derring-do with some of the most bravely confessional writing of his career.