Alison Krauss & Union Station Re-emerge With Arcadia
Russell Moore steps in for Dan Tyminski on the bluegrass band’s first new album in 14 years. On these songs, Krauss sounds ageless and the musicians around her are clearly enjoying themselves.
It’s bound to be a little disappointing to fans of Alison Krauss & Union Station who waited 14 years for a new album only to find that Dan Tyminski, a mainstay of the band on vocals, guitar, and mandolin since 1992, isn’t on it. Fortunately, Russell Moore was available instead.
With Tyminski focused on his solo career, Moore slipped right in like he and Krauss have spent a lifetime swapping songs. He and Tyminski have a similar aesthetic: supple voices with a flat twang and a vibrance you just can’t fake. Yet it’s not a one-for-one swap. Moore, the most awarded male vocalist in the history of the International Bluegrass Music Association, brings his own sensibility to Union Station, and to Arcadia, the group’s first release since Paper Airplane in 2011. It’s perhaps most apparent in the material he sings, which doesn’t always come from the same well of traditional bluegrass and old-time music—though in Union Station’s hands, it sounds like it does. Whether Moore was involved in choosing songs for the album isn’t clear, but Union Station hadn’t previously drawn from material by the likes of JD McPherson or Cordelia’s Dad, each of whom is represented here.
For all Moore’s skill as a singer, Krauss properly remains the primary focus on Arcadia—it is her name out front, after all. She sounds ageless, and though she’s more than capable of singing with power, Krauss favors vocals that are delicate and haunting, as if she’s singing from behind a veil of grief. She gets right into it on opener “Looks Like the End of the Road,” her voice rising and falling on swells of dobro, courtesy of Jerry Douglas, along with piano and mandolin. The song, written by Jeremy Lister, seems to exist in its own time, as emotionally resonant now as it would have been 100 years ago.
Though many of the songs on Arcadia are more contemporary, “Richmond on the James” isn’t one of them. First collected on a field recording of Lena Bourne Fish in New Hampshire in 1941, the track is a Civil War ballad about women mourning husbands and sons who have fallen in battle. Considering the topic, the music is a deceptively plucky blend of banjo and dobro, augmented with rich fiddle. Krass sings with an air of weary sorrow, but also a certain steely tone, as if to ask, what else would you expect from something as stupid and destructive as war?
Krauss learned the song from the musicologist and folk musician Tim Eriksen around 2012, Eriksen says. If that’s true, it’s not his only contribution to Arcadia: Along with writing music and adapting existing lyrics for the Northampton, Massachusetts, folk-punk band Cordelia’s Dad, which he’s fronted for nearly 40 years, he’s also responsible for “Granite Mills.” Moore sings that one on Arcadia with righteous intensity, accompanied by dire minor-key dobro licks as he recounts the fire that killed 23 workers when it ripped through a cotton mill in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1874.
Moore also sings “North Side Gal,” which is quite a bit less fraught. McPherson wrote the song as a jumped-up rhythm & blues number for his 2010 album Signs and Signifiers. In the hands of Union Station, the song is fit for a full-on hootenanny as Moore pitches woo to a woman giving him the cold shoulder. Banjo carries the track, which includes a blazing dobro solo and a stack of low harmony vocals on the chorus.
“North Side Gal” is a rare moment of levity for a band more often immersed in songs of tragedy. The musicians—also including Ron Block on acoustic guitar and banjo and Barry Bales on bass—are clearly enjoying themselves, but then that’s true even when they’re breathing gentle life into last-resort weepers like “There’s a Light Up Ahead,” which closes the album. Given how much the members of Union Station dig collaborating with each other, and how well they mesh when they do, it’s too bad that they don’t get together more often these days.
Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.
