Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A MUST-HAVE
You've probably heard this a thousand times, but if you like bluegrass, and you liked the soundtrack to "O Brother Where Art Thou," you MUST pick up this live double-cd. The sound quality is ultimate perfection, no annoying audience noise during the songs, the musicianship is immaculate, the melodies are beautiful, and the harmonies are utterly fantastic. The music will make your heart pound, it even may bring a tear to your eye...I kid you not. Alison Krauss' voice is angelic, and Union Station's music and harmonies just create this unbelievable wall of sound. It's truly a gorgeous cd. Some of my favorite songs on here are Choctaw Hayride, Everytime You Say Goodbye, and Forget About It. But really this whole double-cd is great and I always listen to it all the way through. It cheers me up, makes the day seem a little brighter. I'm not exaggerating here. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for your friend. Buy it for your folks.
Rating: - Smokin' bluegrass at a smokin' price
I first took note of Allison Krauss and Union Station when they released their incomparable cover of the Foundations' pop classic, 'Baby, now that I've found you.' It's either the jazziest blue-grass or the blue-grassiest pop jazz ever conceived, and it stands completely apart from the original. Most covers--and most especially Nashville covers--add absolutely nothing to the original arrangement, which usually amounts to a net subtraction. This is never the case with Union Station. Krauss' voice alone--a lilting high-lonesome wail, at once brash and plaintive, seductive and scared--would lend moment to a railroad timetable. The instrumental virtuosity and the supporting voices--and the eclectic tastes of the musicians--make for an unequaled experience in what we might call American post-roots music: The instruments of bluegrass and the melancholy of the hills combined with the pace and complexity of modernity.
If you don't know it, the members of Union Station, with Allison Krauss' fiddle but minus her voice, made up 'The Soggy-Bottom Boys' on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, itself a bluegrass tour de force. They cover themselves on this album, Allison Krauss & Union Station: Live, doing the Boys' 'I am a man of constant sorrow,' itself a cover of the very old Clinch Mountain Boys standard. They also do 'Down to the river to pray,' which Allison sang so beautifully on the 'O Brother' soundtrack.
There are 25 songs in this collection, and many of them are uniquely-perfect Union Station covers of other artists' work: 'Baby, now that I've found you,' 'Ghost in this house' by Hugh Prestwood, perhaps the best-ever Nashville songwriter, 'Maybe' from Garth Brooks' underappreciated In... The Life of Chris Gaines album. Union Station had covered the Keith Whitley tune, 'When you say nothing at all,' for a Whitley tribute album, producing a version as haunting as the original without borrowing a thing from Whitley's rough honesty. If anything, the 'Live' version is even better.
And Union Station is a band that simply is better live. They are all virtuoso bluegrass players, but playing live they feed off the energy of the audience, taking that virtuosity to a higher level. This is a very complicated, Apollonian music, and at times the tension is almost unbearable.
Seize the splendor! This is a two-CD set for fifteen bucks, a smokin' deal and an excellent introduction to a very rich kind of bluegrass.
Rating: - talent and musicianship too great to rate
Like many other listeners, I first experienced Alison Krauss' ethereal voice in "O Brother, Where Art Thou." I promptly purchased the soundtrack, which incidentally still gets frequent playing time in my home. Honestly, I hadn't intended to purchase Alison Krauss' work until until I caught a clip of this very same LIVE performance on television. I was so impressed with her musicianship (live shows are good at separating 'studio' artists from the real ones), her poise, the immense talent of her band that I went out and ordered this CD shortly thereafter. Hands down, it's one of the recordings I've heard EVER. With 99% of the albums I purchase, there are a select number of songs I like, and the rest is sort of filler material. There is NO filler on this album. Alison's simple, expressive, angel-like vocals (but boy can she hollar too, make no bones about that!) are reason enough to buy this album, but there are also very fine performances by her bandmates and one guest artist. All in all, a perfect package. Take it from one whose musical collection consists of anything BUT bluegrass or country, and whose musical training is centered primarily around opera, you will wonder why you haven't bought anything of Alison Krauss' before and thank your lucky stars for finding her now. If you're still reticent, listen to "Maybe" on Disc 2. Have your credit card ready.
|
