Arcadia is big news in US roots music. In the 14 years since Union Station’s last LP, its Grammy-winning members have not been idle. Singer and fiddle player Alison Krauss, for one, has released solo outings and a second Robert Plant collaboration. Key foil Dan Tyminski (guitar, vocals), meanwhile, remains focused on his solo career. So Arcadia marks a fresh start with co-vocalist Russell Moore (ex-IIIrd Tyme Out). “His pitch – he’s just a laser beam,” said Krauss in the New York Times.
The two swap lead vocals across 10 tracks whose often mournful subject matter naturally harks back to times past. The production may be slick but rings with understated eloquence. The banjo-driven Richmond on the James records the dying words of a civil war soldier; Krauss’s pristine vocal hovers above the fray, surveying blood and feeling. Moore sings Granite Mills, a righteous broadside against the 1874 death of women and children locked into their fire-ravaged factory.
But there are more recent shivers here. “Goodbye to the world that I know,” sings Krauss on Looks Like the End of the Road, a Jeremy Lister composition she was drawn to during the pandemic. An adaptation of a 1951 Maurice Ogden poem, The Hangman, is a timely parable about being a bystander to evil.
