Review & Photos | Robert Plant | Port Chester

Words by: Chad Berndtson
Images by: Robert Chapman

Robert Plant & The Sensational Space Shifters :: 9.25.14 :: Capitol Theatre :: Port Chester, NY

Read Chad’s thoughts on the show after the gallery.

“Welcome to an evening of country and Eastern,” purred Robert Plant, ever the winking rambler as he kicked off a string of U.S. dates with the Sensational Space Shifters at Port Chester’s Capitol Theatre.

Plant – these days a picture of the regal-looking, leonine rock star as if lord of a Game of Thrones house – has a new album, lullaby…and The Ceaseless Roar, which is an easy thing to like but not to love. It’s a meld of deep-blues and various other forms, from Celtic rock to African folk, that leaves you wanting…not “more” more but maybe something a little bit more focused and less kaleidoscopic.

Live, however, Plant and the crack Space Shifters ensemble flesh these songs out in a way that seems to let them breathe without the distracting production: the lead and colorist players darting and weaving around their whirling sensei, digging into all kinds of sounds, and the rhythm players keeping up a steady roil that only occasionally tips off how exacting they are. The ancient Appalachian tune “Little Maggie,” which closed the show as an encore, was one of many examples where everything Plant and this band are trying hard to say on lullaby… – that suffusion of primal forms in Eastern and Western music – got across, without need for further explanation.

The standouts in Plant’s band, no slouches among them, include keyboardist John Baggott, best known for his work with Portishead and Massive Attack, and who here reveled in the gloamy sonic spot just next to psychedelic and below spooky. And there was rich, wondrous stuff from Juldeh Camara, the Gambian griot hired by Plant to spice the music using a ritti, a one-stringed fiddle. The sound of that instrument alone nailed the “country and Eastern” vibe like nothing else: part pub jig, part desert blues and missed every time Camara – who was only out for about half the songs – left the stage.

But in the center of all the action was one, singular presence. It was Plant’s evident love of these Space Shifter songs that made audience anticipation of the inevitable Led Zeppelin material all that much more fraught –a calculated strategy to revel in the Zeppelin legacy while also eschewing it. (“That’s an old folk song,” he cracked after a beauteous, strings-and-keyboard rearrangement of “Going to California.”)

The crowd couldn’t help itself when it came to “Thank You,” “What Is and What Should Never Be” and other chestnuts leading to the inevitable “Whole Lotta Love.” But neither, really, could Plant: he didn’t much adjust the songs, nor require the Spaceshifters to pull them in to “country and Eastern” – the band went out to meet them, as if the classics couldn’t be controlled.

And any notion that Plant would muddle through them in a sort of perfunctory nod went away as soon as “Thank You” had ended; along with the blues (particularly a mutant version of the Howlin’ Wolf gem “No Place to Go”), they held his fiercest deliveries of the night – his toothiest attacks from those diminished-but-hardly-impotent vocals.

No, Plant couldn’t hide how much he felt them; after a beguiling passage in “Going to California,” for example, he shivered, fluttering his hands, enjoying the frisson. Some spaces may shift, it seems, but others haven’t moved an inch.

Robert Plant, Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, N.Y., 9/25/2014

Set: Poor Howard, Pocketful of Golden, Thank You, No Place to Go, Rainbow, Going to California, A Stolen Kiss, What Is And What Should Never Be, Turn It Up, Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, Fixin’ to Die, Seventh Son > Whole Lotta Love > Who Do You Love?

Encore: Nobody’s Fault But Mine, Little Maggie

JamBase | Planting Roots At The Cap
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