Published on Sep 17, 2000
With the release of his fourth solo album
Now And Zen, former Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant
seemed to recapture some of the magic he once shared with his
former bandmates — not surprising, seeing that Jimmy Page guested
on two tracks.
But when it came time to record the follow-up album, Plant
seemed like he wanted to try to hold onto that magic without
relying on his past. The end result,
Manic Nirvana, proved one thing – he couldn’t. This is a
weak effort that nearly reduces Plant to a bad Zeppelin clone,
though he does hold out some promise towards the end.
To be honest, I had forgotten how much I disliked this album,
having not listened to it in well over four years. The lead-off
track (and first single), “Hurting Kind (I’ve Got My Eyes On You),”
is indicative of how much trouble this album is in from the get-go.
Sounding suspiciously like a re-tread of “Tall Cool One” from
Now And Zen, Plant and company lay down a half-hearted
attempt at rock while Plant moans and wails like an alley cat hit
by a car. Memo to Plant: this schtick worked when you were 20.
Plant can’t even help but to dig up the bones of the past on
“Your Ma Said You Cried In Your Sleep Last Night,” lifting a
portion of the first verse from Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” — good
grief! For an artist who was so cutting-edge at the start of his
solo career because he turned his back on the ghosts of Led
Zeppelin, he’s sure making up for lost time now… and it’s just
not working.
Take tracks like “SSS&Q,” “Tie Die On The Highway,” “I
Cried” and “Big Love,” and add them to this mixture, and it really
seems like
Manic Nirvana is headed towards the great cosmic dumper.
Fortunately for Plant, he is able to pull two miracles out of his
open-shirted sleeve right at the end.
The first comes in the all-too-brief “Liar’s Dance,” a
vocal-and-acoustic-guitar number which breaks loose from the
self-plagiarizing activities of Plant’s two most-current albums at
the time, and allows Plant the freedom to truly emit as a vocalist.
(It also showed the path he was going to start treading on his
future album
Fate Of Nations… but we’re getting ahead of ourselves
now.)
The second comes in the album’s closing track, “Watching You”.
It returns to a rock beat, but coming off of “Liar’s Dance,” this
one seems to have a little more originality injected into it, and
it works better. Where were these tracks a half-hour ago, I found
myself wondering.
I fully understand Plant’s past, and I realize that he’d be a
fool to deny it throughout the length of his solo career. But
Manic Nirvana proves that the good ol’ days of Led Zeppelin
were, at the time of this release, 10 years behind Plant, and it
might have been a good idea to let those days finally go after
exorcising them on
Now And Zen. Instead,
Manic Nirvana sounds like an album of
Now And Zen rejects.