Album Review: Alison Krauss & Union Station, Arcadia

Alison Krauss is bluegrass/folk royalty, having notched up no fewer than 27 Grammy Awards and been inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2021.

Arcadia sees Krauss reuniting with her band of brothers for their first album in 14 years; the good news is that the ensemble have lost none of their power.

The core of Krauss (fiddle, vocal), Jerry Douglas (dobro, lap steel), Ron Block (banjo, guitar) and Barry Bales (bass) have been joined by Russell Moore (guitar and mandolin), who replaces the departed Dan Tyminski who gets a co-writing credit on ‘The Wrong Way’.

Moore takes on lead vocal duties for lonesome murder ballad ‘The Hangman’; the twang and torch of ‘North Side Gal’; the rollicking ‘Snow’, which could be an out-take from the Coen Brothers’ superb O Brother, Where Art Thou?; and the strident, angry ‘Granite Mills’, a traditional song based on the burning of Fall River, New York’s Granite Mills in 1874.

Krauss, meanwhile, lends her considerable vocal talent to the sweet melancholia of ‘The Wrong Way’. ‘One Way Of Shine’ sees her distil a lifetime of experience into four minutes of beautifully winsome balladry and the album is bookended with two songs penned by Nashville singer Jeremy Lister, opening with the bittersweet waltz of ‘The End Of The Road’, and closing with the achingly beautiful and hopeful ‘There’s A Light Up Ahead’.

8/10

Out now