Robert Plant Fate of Nations (1993)

From sputnikmusic.com

Review Summary: Plant in his comfort zone; a beautiful, emotional and very well crafted album. A highpoint in Plant’s post Zep career.
1993 was an interesting music year. Not only did we see some prolific artists release their debut album (Bjork, Radiohead, Suede, Porno For Pyros), there were also some majestic seconds (Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice In Chains).

’93 also brought long anticipated new music by two rock music “dinosaurs”; Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. The latter released the Coverdale-Page album in March, together with stall mate (Geffen Records) David Coverdale to wide critical acclaim. In May, Robert Plant followed with the release of “Fate Of Nations”. Although song credits are shared between Plant and numerous band members, the album was released as a solo effort by Plant.

Apparently, Plant felt a need to go back to basics with this album. Getting inspiration from music that had turned him on during his career from artists like Jefferson Airplane, Tim Hardin and Traffic, Plant was making music that he felt comfortable with, without trying to be innovative or new. Then there was the pressure of Jimmy Page releasing a great album almost at the same time with “the best singer-if-you-can’t-get-Plant”. What we got was Plant’s best album since Led Zeppelin’s break up.

The album opens with “Calling To You”, an Eastern inspired rocker and slightly reminiscent of Zep’s “Kashmir”. It features some interesting violin parts by Nigel Kennedy, who was pretty hot at the time. Plant’s vocal mix is a bit like earlier releases with a little slap back echo.

“Down To The Sea” is a beautiful song carried by dry percussion and acoustic guitar. It has a lot of restrained energy in the verses and then opens up in the chorus. Plant’s vocal sound on this song and on a lot of the following tracks is great with a lot of depth and detail. The slap back echo creeps it’s head up now and then but never so in your face as on Plant’s earlier releases; a good thing!

Next we have “Come Into My Life”. A mid tempo song, again scarcely arranged in the (first) verses with only drums, some sinister guitar work and great vocals from Plant and female backing vocals from Maire Brennan, lead singer with Clannad. This track also builds up nicely to a more powerful chorus where hard strummed acoustic guitar, drum and bass beef it up.

“I Believe” is an emotional and personal track about the tragic loss of Plant’s son Karac. It’s an uptempo song with a poppy arrangement and only stands out from the rest of the tracks because of it’s lyrical content and emotional vocal delivery.

Single “29 Palms” is one of my personal favourites. It has the Zep like guitar riff and typical “Aahaahaaas” in the bridge but the rest of the instrumental arrangement stands it’s own ground, as do Plant’s vocals. It has a lot of Zep feel but still fits on to this album so well on a great central position in the tracklist.
We stay on Led Zep territory with two faced rocker “Memory Song”. Again opening with a great guitar riff and powerful drumming, this track calms down a bit in the bridge parts where 12 string acoustic guitars take centre stage. Great, edgy lead guitar work throughout and superb vocals from Plant bring the listener to the album’s energetic climax. In the last part the song breaks down.

Then, a new opening, a breath of fresh air. If this album would have been released on vinyl we would now go to side B starting with a cover of Tim Hardin’s “If I Were A Carpenter”. A pure folk song and in that respect very much at home on this album. A definite resting point and a quiet, reflective moment before the build up towards the emotional climax of the album begins.

This build up starts with “Colors Of A Shade”. One of the best, if not the best, song on the album. The arrangement shines with amazing (double) acoustic guitar work, emotional vocals and effective use of fretless bass in the chorus. Next we wander back into Zep-land once more with “Promised Land”. The combination of the bluesy guitar riff and the up front harmonica really brings to mind early Led Zeppelin, but somehow also this track manages to fit into the rest of this album easily. Plant’s voice seems to open up even more than on previous tracks and he probably delivers his most powerful vocal on this particular song.
“The Greatest Gift” is a bit of a strange, but very beautiful track carried only by a string arrangement and vocals in the verses with added guitars and drums in the chorus. Like numerous other songs on this album, this track features a bit of a dark atmosphere in the verses. The chorus is just pure beauty and the way Plant sings in the double chorus at the end of the song marks the emotional climax of this album for me.

The last two tracks are sort of “come-down” songs; “Great Spirit” is, as its title suggests, a light hearted spiritual song. Also light in arrangement, it’s an easy listen and I would have favoured it as last song for this album. However, the album closes on a more rocky and political note with “Network News”, probably Plant’s most socially involved song but a bit of a strange ending to such an emotional album.

All in all “Fate Of Nations” marks a highpoint in Plant’s post-Led Zeppelin career. The album is full of superbly arranged and executed songs and Plant’s vocals take you from the darkest depths of his emotions to more light hearted mournfulness, always sincere and genuine. All we can hope for is one more album like this before the man retires for good.

Robert Plant Fate of Nations (1993)

From brutallyhonestrockalbumreviews.wordpress.com

This is not a popular opinion, but if you ask me we are all lucky Led Zeppelin ended when they did.  Don’t get me wrong, it is a genuine tragedy that the death of John Henry Bonham was what brought the Zeppelin juggernaut down, but down it needed to come, and it did so not a moment too soon.  Robert Plant had long ago lost his trademark high pitched banshee wail, although he learned to compensate with considerable power in his lower ranges.  Bonzo was a case of alcohol poisoning waiting to happen, and I doubt anyone around him was too surprised when it did. John Paul Jones had gotten hopelessly lost in Yamaha Synthesizerland, I really don’t understand how he couldn’t hear how thin and weak and cheesy the synths he was using at the time came across on record.  Which leaves us with Mr. Too Smacked Out to Properly Play Guitar, who a decade earlier had inherited the title of Greatest Guitarist on the Planet upon the death of Jimi Hendrix, and through a combination of drug addiction, disinterest in practicing his instrument, and zero ambition in expanding his playing technique after about 1975, ceded the title to Eddie Van Halen in 1977 without so much as a whimper.  Some exciting things were happening in the world of guitar in the late 70s, but after Presence Page couldn’t be bothered to shake himself out of his heroin-induced haze and try and keep up with what the rest of the guitar world was doing.

John Bonham’s death was a tragedy – the end of Led Zeppelin was not.  Their atrocious playing on the disastrous 1977 tour somehow failed to kill their reputation, probably because everyone who came to see them was too high to notice how bad they were.  They did manage to pull things together for a couple of shows in 1979, the Copenhagen warmup shows and the first Knebworth show were pretty good (not the second one though, they were back to playing like crap for that show).  Then there was the Tour Over Europe 1980, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt they were incapable of pulling it together for more than a show or two in a tour.  If they had toured America in 1980/1981, I am honestly not sure their reputation would have survived it. And that is what they were rehearsing for when Bonzo finally drank himself to death.  I’ll go so far as to say that had Bonham survived six more months, the Mighty Zep would not be remembered as being quite so mighty as they are today.  In Through the Out Door showed us how close to the bottom of the barrel they were, with the weak-as-water synthesized posturings of “Carouselumbra” and the incomprehensible bluster of “South Bound Saurez”, not to mention the showcase of sloppy guitar playing that is “Hot Dog” and the boring sludgefest that is “I’m Gonna Crawl”.  Other than the spiffy stomp of “In the Evening”, the snazzy pop of “Fool in the Rain” (perhaps their least Zep-like song, but a catchy piece of Top 40 pop if taken on those terms), and the shimmering “All My Love”, the album was a freakin’ dumpster fire.  Three good songs is far too few for Zep’s usual high standards.  And the main reason for it was that Jimmy was too smacked out to show up for the sessions a lot of the time, and leaving John Paul alone in a studio with his new Yamaha synthesizer for any length of time was clearly not good for anyone involved.

So, yeah, I know this is rock heresy, but I’m pretty damn happy that Led Zeppelin didn’t exist in 1993, because if they had, there is no way Robert Plant would ever had been involved with an album as sublime as Fate of Nations – his biggest artistic triumph in a solo career with oodles of them.  Now granted, Page managed to clean himself up by then and release the excellent and under-rated Coverdale/Page, so who knows, maybe there was enough magic around in 1993 that a Zeppelin album might have been up to snuff.  But when Page and Plant did put together an album of original songs a few years later, the magic most definitely was not there, so I have a hard time believing even given the excellence of Page’s playing in the studio in 1993 that we could have expected a Zeppelin masterpiece.   What we did get was a Robert Plant masterpiece, and I’ll take it.

After The Mighty Zeppelin came crashing to ground, it took our boy Bobby a few years to find his feet.  Pictures at Eleven had a few interesting moments musically, but other than “Moonlight in Samosa” and maybe “Like I’ve Never Been Gone”, it didn’t really have any songs on it.   Stuff like “Fat Lip” and “Worse than Detroit” were completely incomprehensible lyrically, irredeemably uninteresting melodically, and hopelessly muddled musically.  The Principle of Moments wasn’t any better, with the exception of “Big Log”, which became a giant hit, and maybe “In the Mood” (“Messin’ with the Mekon” was more typical of the bland, formless sludge on that album).   Shaken and Stirred was admirable in terms of musical adventurism and dismal in terms of songcraft.  It wasn’t until his fourth solo album that Plant really started to figure it out, with both the adventurism and the quality songs to produce a great album, and Now and Zen finally gave us the strong album our Robert was capable of.  And in so doing Plant pulled off that rarest of tricks, releasing an album that was innovative, adventurous, and unique, but still commercial.  While the follow-up Manic Nirvana may not have fared as well commercially, it was even better artistically.

Which brings us to Fate of Nations, in my opinion the culmination of years of restless  searching by an artist seeking an album worthy of his musical wanderlust.  While the two albums that preceded it were great, this is where at all came together for me,  the absolute pinnacle of Robert Plant’s career as a solo artist.  Never had he, and never again would he, release something so effortless exotic, so emotionally evocative, so arrestingly melodic, or as unabashedly passionate.  Here was an artist in a band who had once ruled the world, who had fallen from those lofty heights and then clawed his way to the higher reaches of the charts again – and who was now ready to take all the lessons in songcraft the preceding years had taught him, and use that hard-won knowledge to make an album for himself, on his own terms.  While to some extent I got the sense that Zen was Robert Plant aiming for the charts, Nirvana sounded more like he was just making the album he felt like making at the time, and by Fate of Nations he was ready to make an album where he couldn’t care less if no one ever heard it but him.   Fate of Nations was an album of strong songs that wasn’t concerned about commerciality in the way that Now and Zen was – where that album fit comfortably into the keyboard-driven aesthetic of the Top 40 of the mid-Eighties, FoN was worlds away from the grunge and hip-hop that ruled the charts in the early-Nineties.

Take for example the opening track, “Calling to You”.   Deep chords ring out with a gentle yet foreboding, mysterious chime, resonant and haunting, a lone acoustic guitar begins an exotic sounding strum – and then suddenly the song explodes with a monster riff that bursts out of the sky like a comet hitting the atmosphere.  The first time you hear it that riff takes you completely by surprise, an opening as powerful as “Immigrant Song” on Led Zeppelin III, but far more sneaky and devious because you don’t see it coming.  How could the album not be a classic with an opening like that? After that explosive opening whacks you on the side of the head, the song never lets you go for its full five minutes and 48 seconds, with its heavy hypnotic riffage, doomsday descending notes on the bridge, and ultra cool electric violin solo outro.  This is an opening track almost as powerful as anything Zeppelin ever laid down, and an exceptional start to an exceptional album.

”Down to the Sea” sounds unlike anything I’ve ever heard – I’m not really sure how to categorize it, I honestly can’t think of another song to compare it to.  Think about it – how many songs can you think of that are so unique nothing else sounds anything like it?  But so it is with “Down to the Sea”.    With its chiming guitars, pounding beat, and irresistible melody, it’s another winner.  “Watching the ships pass by me/friendships and small ships and hardships and dreams…” – classic.  This always reminds me of a sunny afternoon I spent on a beach in Cancun more than a quarter of a decade ago, with my “head…in the sand”.  Exotic, evocative, shimmering and bright, yet danceable – personally I think it’s a remarkable song.

More chiming guitars herald the intro to the moody “Come Into My Life” – like many of the songs on the album, Plant gives the music some time to breathe, the guitars kind of gently unfurl around him as he sings that “Hopes drift in higher places/it’s easier above the gloom…” as he invites his love to “pour the hope back in my eyes I thought I’d lost so long ago”.  Then the intense chorus comes crashing in “Come into my life/Here where nothing matters/Come into my life/Roll away the gloom”.  This song illustrates the dynamics and contrasts you find all over the album, the light and shade that was always so much a part of the Zeppelin mystique that Plant weaves so expertly into the songs on the album.  Coverdale/Page may have been the more Zeppelin-sounding of the two albums, but Fate of Nations better captured the myth, mystery, and majesty Page and Plant once captured so effortlessly on the albums of their old band, that slippery formula Page always tried to find again but never quite could.

Plant wrote “All My Love” from In Through the Out Door in honor of his son Karac, who died of a stomach virus at the age of five back in 1977 while his father was in the middle of a tour of America – but “I Believe” from Fate of Nations is by far the more moving memorial.  “Like the wind, you are free/Just a whisper I hear you so talk to me…”.  “I Believe” isn’t a mournful dirge by any stretch, more of a tribute and a celebration of the son Plant had lost.  The chiming guitars and propulsive rhythm are there like many of the other songs, yet there is still something so longing and wistful about it: “Oh, I believe, aye do aye/Say brother sisters, see your brother’s in the sky…”.   It’s a fitting expression of the love of a father for a son he had lost almost two decades earlier.  And as the song trails off with Plant’s final “I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe”, the is no question in the listener’s mind that he means it.

Incidentally, the song also tells of an important change in the story of Led Zeppelin – any father would be changed forever by the loss of a young son, it’s only natural that Plant wasn’t the same person afterwards.   But when he stepped away from Led Zeppelin to grieve with his family, the balance of power in the band shifted forever from Page to Plant.  There’s an old saying that the person who cares the least in a relationship has the most power, and so it was here.  Where before Page called all the shots and Plant accepted it without question, in stepping away Plant discovered how much his guitarist needed him – and what a position of power that put him in.  From then on Zeppelin would exist on Robert’s terms only – they returned to the studio in Robert’s time, they “cut the waffle” in the setlist when Robert felt they should move away from half-hour long instrumentals on stage, they changed their approach to touring – and eventually after Bonham’s demise it was Robert who set the terms for when and if they got back together.  The few times they all got back together it was Robert who called the shots, and the Page/Plant collaboration of the 90s existed exactly as long as Robert had any interest in it.  In some ways, “I Believe” is as much about the death of Led Zeppelin as the death of Karac Plant.  And it is one of the highlights of an amazing album.

As is “29 Palms”, where Plant pulls off the cool trick of starting out with intense, driving verses that rush and flow with Robert’s trademark wails which then like a waterfall drop into the smooth lake of a laid-back chorus.  The vibe of the song shifts so dramatically and yet so naturally, from a pounding beat in the verses to a gently swaying shuffle in the chorus – it’s pure magic.   I love the guitar solo after the second verse too, gliding gently across the soundscape.  Easily one of Plant’s greatest moments as a solo artist.  This was the last solo Robert Plant song I ever heard on the radio, and what an excellent song to exit the Top 40 with.

“Memory Song (Hello Hello)” as a cool descending riff, and while not as lyrically penetrating as the songs that precede it, there’s enough tasty guitar to make it a worthwhile listen.   Plant’s cover of  Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter” is gorgeous though – heartfelt and majestic, with rustic guitar and soaring strings.  This would have been Plant’s greatest cover version ever were it not for the untoppable “Song to the Siren” on Dreamland, which as one reviewer so aptly put it, “outaches the original”.  “If I Were a Carpenter”, however, is almost as remarkable, and all the warmth and emotion in his vocals tells you how much Plant loves the song.  It is also a preview of Plant’s next album, the underappreciated Dreamland, where Plant would cover the songs he loved from his youth with a fire and tenderness seldom found in the albums that came before – except on Fate of Nations.

I’m not gonna lie, I have to admit that the album loses steam for me a little bit at this point, and I am not nearly as familiar with the songs that follow as I am the first seven.  “Promised Land” has some wicked harmonica playing by Plant, and a chorus that kind of grabs your attention, but after seven classic songs in a row it can’t help but suffer by comparison.  It is solid, but dispensable. To be honest, I usually skip it, but it isn’t bad really.  “The Greatest Gift” finds Plant experimenting with swooping, histrionic string arrangements – I admire them more for their uniqueness than I actually enjoy listening to them.  But there is no denying the feeling in his vocal on the chorus, it is a typically astoundingly powerful Robert Plant vocal performance.  Lyrically and melodically it isn’t as strong as most of the songs that preceded it, and while the chorus has a impassioned vocal by Plant, it never really capitalizes on that, and doesn’t have a strong enough melody to merit that passion.  Not to mention the somewhat awkward transition back to the verses when it ends.  I do like the string arrangement, but the song itself is no great shakes, and at this point I think it becomes clear that Plant front loaded all of the best songs on the album.

”Great Spirit” has this funky but subdued 70s vibe which is all right, but the lyrics are kind of goofy: “Great spirit come, great spirit come/Who has chased away the moonbeams?/Who has pulled a blanket across the sky?/Who will sing in celebration/Throughout this land that’s bound to die?”  The music kind of snoozy too, so this one never really holds my interest.  It would have worked better if it was shorter, there just isn’t enough going on musically to justify the more than five and a half minute running time.  I don’t know, it just doesn’t grab me the way that the first seven songs do.

So about two-thirds the way through the album shifts from absolute classic to just pretty good – none of these last few songs are bad, they are in fact “just pretty good”, they just don’t have the same oomph of the first 2/3 of the album.  And I think that’s intentional, it seems to me Plant knew which songs were strongest.  The strategy for sequencing albums was very different in the CD age than it had been in the vinyl age – in the vinyl age, you knew that halfway through the album the listener would have to flip the thing over to side B and start over, so it would be a good idea to have a strong song leading off that second side.   In the age of CDs, however, you wouldn’t have that transition in the middle, so the smartest thing to do was frontload all of your good songs and keep the listeners’ attention for as long as you could.  When I look at the programming decisions made when vinyl was king versus when CDs were all the rage, I think it’s pretty clear that became the thinking when developing the sequencing of your album.  Take, for example, Queen II –  the distinction between the “white side” and the “black side” is completely lost in the digital age when albums have no “sides”, and had the album been made 20 years later, the sequencing would likely have been very different.

Album closer, “Network News”, is catchy enough, it’s got a smooth, slick guitar riff, and Plant spits out lyrics about “Guns death and noise Sand oil and blood” and “propaganda’s paper fist” and “Hallelujah, hallelujah, oil oil.”  As commentaries on the First Gulf War go (and such is the theme of the song that its author would betray no surprise to find there was going to be a Second one), I actually like it.  As Plant bitingly notes, the rest of the world watched with “No consideration made for/The poor creature who is living By the grace of God just giving/He’s live on network news Live on network news” as the Persian Gulf erupted in flames.  I well recall watching the bombs on network news without it really sinking in that somewhere in those fireballs real people were dying.  Not a bad way to close out the album, but it still doesn’t meet the standards set by the first 2/3 of the album.  Like the three songs that precede it I wouldn’t really call it filler – they are all decent, solid songs.

Never before had Robert Plant laid so much of his heart bare as he had on this album, and never would he again.  His restless approach to his artistry is well known – but not all of his musical travels have been worth the rest of us tagging along.  For me, Fate of Nations was the album where the passion for the material, the strong songwriting, the neverending search for new sounds, and the exceptional vocal showmanship all came together and meshed perfectly –  one or the other of these elements were found on his other solo albums, but this was the one with the alchemy that blended them together just right.

Catch me on the right day, and I might even say this album is as good as anything Plant ever did with his former band.

Robet Plant Fate Of Nations (1993)

From martinleedham.wordpress.com

Primarily recorded at RAK Studios during the back end of 1992 and early 1993 “Fate of Nations” was Robert Plant’s sixth solo outing and remains his most Zeppelin like solo record.

In fact it is difficult not to argue that if Zeppelin had been able to continue into the nineties that this would have been the exact type of recording they would have been making. Elements of Zeppelin going as far back as Led Zeppelin III are evident as well as the more obvious similarities to the later albums. That is not to say though that this is a poor mans Zeppelin album. Quite the opposite in fact and I will argue long and hard that this is Robert Plant’s most consistent and well rounded album.

Often cited as a cry to Jimmy Page to work together again opening track ‘Calling To You’ could also be Plant displaying to David Coverdale who was at the time collaborating with Page that when it came to Zepplinesque vocals he was still the master. After an almost gentle intro the track comes to life as a hard hitting fast paced cousin of ‘Kashmir’ with a trademark pouting Plant vocal. The guitar work from Kevin Scott McMichael is spot on and Nigel Kennedy’s violin compliments it perfectly driving the riff along before exploding into a frantic finale.

‘Down To The Sea’ is less frantic but no less enjoyable. Think of one of those folky workouts from Led Zeppelin III or Physical Graffiti rocked up with a huge chunk of eastern mysticism added and you’ve pretty much got the idea. ‘Come Into My Life’ is the first of the slower songs and is literally dripping with emotion. The backing vocals of Maire Brennan, harmonium of Phil Johnstone and hurdy gudy of Nigel Eaton creating the perfect backdrop for a husky passion filled Plant vocal.

At this point in the album the lighter more commercial radio friendly sound comes in with the two better known tracks from the album. Placing the two next to each other was a work of genius as they compliment each other perfectly. ‘I Believe’ starts with an almost pop like intro before the melody takes over and transforms the song into a classic peice of commercially accessable nineties rock. ’29 Palms’ carries the feeling on perfectly and was Plants tribute to not only the town in the Mojave desert but also Canadian songstress Alannah Myles with whom he was …….. lets just say touring …… at the time he wrote it. Note the velvet glove reference at the beginning of the song. Either of the two could be seen as natural progressions from ‘All My Love’ on “In Through The Out Door”

The power is back with ‘Memory Song’ which opens with a particularly heavy riff that remains prominent throughout. Some acoustic guitar is layered on top in parts but in truth the song really fails to go anywhere. It is one of the few weak links on the album for me but that may of course come from following the five excellent tracks that started the album off. The cover of Tim Hardin’s ‘If I Were A Carpenter’ is next and takes Plant right back to his days on the folk circuit of the Black Country. Hardin’s tracks for me have always been better when performed by someone else and Plant re-iterates that view for me here as his version is far superior to the original.

The string arrangement by Lynton Maiff and mandolin of Maartin Allcock setting off the track nicely. ‘Colours of a Shade’ starts off with an almost spanish guitar intro from Allcock who also plays mandolin again and Aeoleon pipes along with Chris Hughes. All this provides an extremely atmospheric, almost ethnic and beautiful backing for another sublime Plant vocal. For some reason this track was left off some non UK issues of the album. A curious decision to say the least but one which has been rectified on subsequent issues. ‘Promised Land’ sees a return to the band sound and is another fast paced riff driven track that wouldn’t have been out of place on one of the later Zeppelin albums. Along with the earlier ‘Memory Song’ it is, for me at least, lacking in the quality of the other tracks.

The next two tracks ‘The Greatest Gift’ and ‘Great Spirit’ have been described as Plant’s most heartfelt vocals ever and whilst that may not be entirely correct they are certainly up there with the best of them. One thing that can’t be denied though is that this is certainly Plant’s most personal album. The lyrics throughout giving rare glimpses into the mans soul and inner feelings on a variety of subjects. The posturing rock God and hiding behind Tolkien themes and imagery is long gone and what we have here is an artist reaching into the very depths of their being and laying it out there for all to see and it is indeed the greatest gift he can give us. Plant displays his love of the ethnic and of eastern mysticism once more with the truly wonderful ‘Great Spirit’. Rarely has a song about social conscience and the self destructive nature of the human been so beautiful and also so uncondescending.

You actually believe by the end of it that Plant truly believes every word he has sung. Packed full of feeling and soul it demonstrates a side of Plant’s vocal ability which is sadly overlooked by many, and is one which he goes back to all to infrequently. There is an argument that this is the best track on the album. High praise indeed but fully deserved. The closing track ‘Network News’ is a fast paced angry swipe at the purveyors and surveyors of the worlds demise and is almost a parallel delivery of the previous tracks message. If ‘Great Spirit’ was saying it with love then ‘Network News’ is saying it with a mighty uncontrolled anger.

“Fate of Nations” is unfairly overlooked by many as Robert Plant’s ‘social conscience album’. For me though it is the perfect Robert Plant album. It highlights all of his vocal and songwriting abilities and sees him reaching new heights as a lyricist. Far superior to any of the subsequent Page/Plant releases it is undoubtedly the jewel in the crown of Plant’s solo career. In fact it is so good as a listening experience that I believe it is second only to Led Zeppelin II in Plant’s entire back catalogue.

Robert Plant Fate Of Nations (1993)

From starling.rinet.ru

Something must have surely happened during the minuscule two-year period between Manic Nirvana and this album, because it’d be hard to imagine two albums more stylistically and emotionally different from one another, unless you bring Central Siberian folk motives into the picture. But it’s more than just a matter of “difference”; it’s almost a matter of “rebirth”. Fate Of Nations offers us a new, revised and restructured version of Robert Plant, one you could only see occasional brief glimpses of in the past. It’s a cleaned up, sobered up, straightened up, wisened up version of Robert Plant. If Robert Plant had been Tigger, this version of Robert Plant would have been the Domesticated Tigger of Rabbit’s dreams. Only this time Rabbit’s dreams have actually come alive.

And it’s a great version of Robert Plant. You know, ever since he became hiding behind all the gimmicks and antics of mid-period Zeppelin, as I now realize, in the heat of all the gimmick-bashing I have almost managed to forget how totally cool his singing voice was from the very beginning, and how it never really lost any of its power since the day it first became known to soon-to-be Zep fans. Behind the “baby babies”, and all the strutting, and all the posturing, and all the meaningless, but pompous lyrics, I’ve missed the actual guy. And this is where I get the actual guy – disarmed and almost frighteningly sincere, first time since… well, ever, I guess!

Yep, this is an old man’s album. Another old man’s album out of a miriad. It doesn’t rock too hard and it sure doesn’t experiment. And it radically and utterly and completely steps away from any trends there might have been in the past two decades; indeed, many of the songs seriously attempt to recreate the classic Zeppelin sound of old instead, and some actually succeed, thus paving the way for Plant’s reunion with Page in the next few years. It’s also rather long and I couldn’t call all of its melodies instantly memorable. But it touched something deep within me upon the very first listen, and now, completing my fourth, I feel ready to make the final conclusion: Fate Of Nations can honestly rank up there with some of Led Zeppelin’s best work, and there’s no shame in believing that.

It is quite different, though. Like I said – no strutting (‘Promised Land’ has some, but it’s just a cute little exception that only proves the rule). Those with little tolerance towards non-aggressive, easy-going (by all means not to be confused with “easy listening”!) rootsy pop will hardly understand how anything on here can be discussed on equal terms with ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or ‘Stairway To Heaven’. No, this is quiet stuff, and certainly nowhere near groundbreaking. But it’s amazingly consistent – not one tune on here that hasn’t got some interesting point to prove – and there’s about as much sincere passion and humanism here as there is swagger and youthful arrogance on Zep’s ’68-’71 albums.

No Led Zeppelin song, let alone a Robert Plant solo song, has ever made me cry (although ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ and ‘I’m Gonna Crawl’ came pretty close at times). All the more amazing is how ‘I Believe’, a tune you might know since it was a single and got some good airplay in its time, manages to hold me in Robert’s own shoes for four minutes, making me care about his long-lost son almost as if it were my own offspring. As much as I like Clapton’s ‘Tears In Heaven’, I’m afraid Robbie wins here, with one of the saddest and at the same time most uplifting odes to a dead person ever written. The lyrics are never obtrusive – it’s not even that easy to tell who the song is addressed to without a very scrupulous analysis – and Plant’s vocal delivery is absolutely breathtaking; I get goosebumps every time the ‘neighbour, neighbour, don’t be so cold’ line rings out loud and clear. Throw in some great vocal harmonies; fresh, lively guitar jangle and a Byrds-ey guitar solo; and a moderate synthesizer backdrop that happens to actually add depth rather than reinstate banality. Gorgeous.

It’s clearly the best song, but it’s only one song, after all – what if he let us down with the rest of this material? He doesn’t. Even the more ‘fillerish’ tracks, like the unexpected cover of Tim Hardin’s ‘If I Were A Carpenter’ (the early precursor to Dreamland), is graciously sung and arranged, with exquisite orchestration, pretty acoustic guitar, and a weird sitar track as a bonus. The already mentioned ‘Promised Land’ doesn’t quite fit in with the mood, but it’s a hoot, almost a benevolent parody on classic Led Zeppelin: its main groove and arrangement tricks including echoey harmonica make me think of ‘When The Levee Breaks’, among other things. But even then Plant is nowhere near obnoxious, delivering the moderately smutty lyrics in a weird, hoarse manner.

As for the carefully thought out material, much of it is absolutely first-rate. ‘Calling To You’ once again tries to capture the ‘Kashmir’ vibe, but this time with memorable riffs and really interesting mood shifts between verse and chorus. ‘Down To The Sea’ is upbeat and toe-tappable but essentially folksy, combining a taste for the archaic with a love for all things catchy and radio-ready. ‘Come Into My Life’ is Plant at his pleading best, conveying desperation and longing by actually singing the lines rather than adlibbing moot stuff. (I seem to remember Maire Brennan of Clannad credited for backing vocals here – or was it on a different song from the same album? in any case, there’s plenty of traditional Celtic elements as well as Enya-style-ified treatings of the same on here, and it’s good).

The record might drag in a few spots (it IS long), but it’s nowhere near as monotonous as this review might make it seem; it’s just that since the melodies rarely “jump out” at you, at first there might be a suspicion of the album being too ‘smooth’. It isn’t, really. Apart from pseudo-adult contemporary, folkish stuff, Eastern stuff, and direct Zep imitations, there’s also some straightforward catchy guitar pop like ’29 Palms’ – a song that I first thought bland and uninteresting, but later found totally addictive because of the great guitar arrangement – and some of Plant’s obligatory pagan mysticism (‘Great Spirit’) which is sorta like heavy-metal-meets-New-Age on practice, and even a heavy rocker about the Gulf War (‘Network News’) which, once again, doesn’t quite fit in with the rest, but contains some excellent riffage and basically achieves its not-so-complex goal, namely, to kick some political ass.

In short, Fate Of Nations done me good. It gave me (so far) four hours of what I’d call “rational enjoyment” – even when the music wasn’t THAT good, it felt great listening to it just because instead of getting all the bad things you’d expected, you weren’t getting none of it; the sight of Robert Plant doing an album so decidedly “un-Robert Plant”, and doing it with confidence, devotion, and sympathy, was enough to put the juice back in the cherry, if you pardon a sleazy metaphor. And when the music was good, it made me think of Robert Plant as a sensitive human being, heck, just a real person, not a long haired stage muppet. And kudos to his backing band as well: they seem to be more or less the same as on Manic Nirvana, and yet they are able to deliver tasteful, gallant music in the “laid back” vein just as genuinely as they were able to deliver brawny rock’n’roll two years ago.

Robert Plant Fate Of Nations (1993)

From musicbox-oneline.com

So daunting is the legacy of Led Zeppelin that even a powerhouse vocalist like Robert Plant felt obliged for a time to flee from it. Consequently, where his former band came roaring out of the gate, fully formed and foaming at the mouth, Plant stumbled through a series of solo outings in the 1980s on which he increasingly employed the sort of overly produced, synth-drenched arrangements that typified the era, the kind that now sound seriously dated. Granted, he still commanded attention; likewise, his work contained hints of his glorious history. Yet, his commercial success hindered his evolution more than it helped it. After all, why should he repair something that was so financially lucrative? Although he continued to germinate new ideas and carry forward the concepts that he had developed with Led Zeppelin, he also appeared to be paralyzed by his attempts to hold onto the past while slipping into the present.

Then, along came Fate of Nations, an album that, 14 years after its release, remains the most pivotal effort of Plant’s canon. Hardly a perfect endeavor, it was, nonetheless, the outing on which he turned a corner, discovered a way out of his dilemma, and mounted an escape from the glossy textures that had sucked the organic essence from Shaken ’n‘ Stirred, Now and Zen, and Manic Nirvana. As a vocalist, he arguably never sounded better than he did on Fate of Nations. Although he still was quite capable of conjuring demons with his anguished, tormented wail, he also had gained a supple expressiveness that could hold its own with the best that Motown had to offer. In the end, Fate of Nations gave Plant the confidence to embark upon a full-fledged reunion with guitarist Jimmy Page — which, as it turned out, was more hype than substance. Most important, though, it effectively relaunched his solo career by laying a firm foundation for everything that followed.

Right from the start, with the propulsive, heavy stomp of Calling to You— one of many permutations of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir that he has concocted over the years — it was clear that the crafting of Fate of Nations had stirred something deep within Plant’s soul. Replacing Page’s crash-and-burn pyrotechnics with violinist Nigel Kennedy’s manic inventiveness, the song served notice that Plant had begun to rediscover his wayward muse. Still, the first half of the outing faltered slightly as the Eastern shadings of Calling to You gave way to the tabla-driven groove of Down to the Sea; the duskily hypnotic country-soul of Come into My Life; and the infectious pop of I Believe and 29 Palms, before finally swerving back into the snaking, Zeppelin-esque march of Memory Song (Hello, Hello). Still, the primal, heavy metal intensity that made his former band’s work so forcefully compelling was noticeably diminished, and the atmospherics that Plant applied to the rest of the opening act’s tracks were so disparate that the material, good as it was, struggled to assume a single-minded sense of identity.

The latter half of Fate of Nations, however, unrolled in a remarkably cohesive fashion, and taken in full, it shed light on the entirety of the affair. Containing his trademark, blues-baked swagger, Promised Land was a writhing fireball that fully tapped into the gritty potency of Plant’s past, while the Biblical implications of Tim Hardin’s folk classic If I Were a Carpenter became the lynchpin that not only united the endeavor but also bound Plant’s pre-Zeppelin pursuits to his subsequent solo outing Dreamland. Furthering this notion is the lovely remake of Moby Grape’s 8:05 that augments the remastered rendition of the effort.

Nevertheless, the final two tracks (Great Spirit and Network News) were what lent Fate of Nations its heart and soul as Plant outlined the horrors facing the world and called upon a higher power for guidance and salvation. Set up perfectly by the gentle, loving smoothness of The Greatest Gift, Great Spirit spiraled outward from Marvin Gaye’s iconic outingWhat’s Going On to develop a life of its own; and with lyrics that tell tales of “flags, princes, kings, patriotic fools/as freedom lies in twisted heaps,” Network News was a scathing indictment of the first war in Iraq that chillingly has repeated its relevance a decade later. In 2005, Plant reworked his ideas and tweaked his overall approach, the result of which was Mighty ReArranger, the current pinnacle of his solo canon. It all began, though, with Fate of Nations, an outing that has grown in stature and magnificence as it has aged.