Alison Krauss & Union Station Reunite Rendering Tragic Tales With Slivers Of Hope On ‘Arcadia’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

When you’re an established institution like Alison Krauss & Union Station, you can take 14 years off and pick up again as if you never left. Heck, The Rolling Stones had an 18-year hiatus. Of course, Krauss kept herself busy touring with Robert Plant, and the members of Union Station are a team of band leaders who engage in their own projects. Krauss has collected a stockpile of songs for the past 30 to 40 years. Yet, she’s a perfectionist, constantly seeking the ‘perfect’ song to lead off an album. When she found that in Jeremy Lister’s “Looks Like the End of the Road,” she convened the band. Krauss still sings and plays fiddle but shares the lead vocals with new member Russell Moore, the most awarded male vocalist in the history of the IBMA, and frontman of Russell Moore & IIrd Tyme Out, and formerly of Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver. Moore replaces longtime favorite guitarist and vocalist Dan Tyminski. The mainstays are Jerry Douglas (Dobro, lap steel, vocals), Ron Block (banjo, guitar, vocals), and Barry Bales (bass, vocals). A few other musicians appear on select tracks for Arcadia.

Krauss has a penchant and reputation for singing tragic songs and visiting the past. When gleaning the lyrics to these ten tunes, it is striking that so many of these songs are incredibly sad. Finding the slivers of hope is challenging, but they are there. Considering the immense musical chops of her band members and conventional notions of bluegrass music, there are far fewer up-tempo tunes than some would like, but that’s their mantra. In that sense, the album could benefit from better balance as we deal primarily with ballads through these ten. Yet, who can argue with Krauss’ immaculate, singular vocals and Moore’s powerful voice? It is a great counterpoint, although, to be fair, they sometimes seem at odds with each other. One wants to ramp up the energy, while the other is content with the sad ballads. 

Krauss kicks off with the aforementioned tune, with her talent for making mournful lyrics sound beautiful buoyed here by Douglas’s Dobro and guest Jeff Taylor on accordion as the chorus loudly says resignation – “Goodbye to the world that I know/Looks like the end of the road.” Moore steps in for the following ballad, “Hangman,” as pianist Viktor Krauss puts Maurice Odgen’s poem to music, painting a bleak portrait of the “gallows tree on the courthouse square.” Alison returns for yet another down-tempo tune, “The Wrong Way,” that straddles the emotional landscape somewhere between the opener and just a short measure of resilience left. Moore’s deep, resonant voice spins the tragic true story of the Granite Mills fire in Fall River, MA, that in 1874 took the lives of 23 women and children. The lyrics are in the Public Domain. It was a catalyst for workers rights and is controversial because many reports indicate that the overseers reached the ground first. The verses explain in vivid detail what happened to specific individuals, but Moore says in the chorus,s “Now it was my opinion/And it’s my opinion still/They might all have been saved/Had the truth been told/From the flames of the burning mill.”

Sarah Siskind and Viktor Krauss’s “One Ray of Shine” is yet another ballad, this one with some hope. The protagonist is a recluse who prefers the hollow tree in the yard, yearning for one ray of sunshine. As on most of these, Douglas is the principal soloist here along with guest mandolinist Adam Steffey, who is paired with Block’s banjo on the mid-tempo Civil War tale “Richmond on the James,” another with Public Domain lyrics. Krauss finds beauty in the innocence of a woman telling the dark story of a young soldier. Some levity appears (finally) in the rave-up “North Side Gal,” sung mostly by Bales and Block with the twin fiddles of Alison and Stuart Duncan.  The band unleashes in the album’s only true burner, “Snow,” with Moore’s great vocal soaring above the fine picking. Jeremy Lister’s “There’s a Light Up Ahead” is a bookend to his penned opener, but with the opposite emotion, seeking hope as Alison delivers her finest vocal performance.

Dust off that trusty formula and march forward.