Album Review: Alison Krauss & Union Station, 'Arcadia'

In traditional legend and literature, Arcadia names a pastoral place ruled by harmony. The ten songs on Alison Krauss & Union Station’s new album Arcadia—the first since their chart-topping Paper Airplane (2011)—evoke such a world even as they reveal the tragic truths that often dwell within it. Despite the length of time between albums, Arcadia simply picks up the musical notes and threads out of which Alison Krauss & Union Station have long been weaving radiant and transportive patterns of sound.

On Arcadia, Alison Krauss (fiddle, lead vocal), Jerry Douglas (Dobro, lap steel, vocals), Ron Block (banjo, guitar, vocals), and Barry Bales (bass, vocals) welcome guitarist and vocalist Russell Moore, best known as the front man of IIIrd Tyme Out, to the Union Station lineup, after the departure of long-time member Dan Tyminski, who left to focus on his solo career.

Swirling Dobro and gently down strums of the guitar open the album’s lead track, “Looks Like the End of the Road,” a tender meditation on beauty and the losses that often lie buried within it. Almost a lullaby, the twirling blend of Krauss’ shimmering vocals and layers of glimmering instrumentation evoke the sounds that might accompany a dancer in a high-wire act in a small carnival. The chilling ballad “The Hangman” opens sparely with Moore’s vocals riding over acoustic guitar fingerpicking, creating a bleak portrait of the gallows and the hangman’s appointed business in the little town square. Moore’s sparkling and plaintive baritone vocals convey the desolation and sorrow, anger and regret in the Celtic-inflected “Granite Mills,” a traditional ballad about the 1874 Granite Mills fire in Falls River, Massachusetts, that killed 23 women and children. The spaciously unfurling “One Ray of Shine” is a lilting ode to the welcome warmth of a ray of sunshine in the midst of an otherwise dark place. The swinging rhythms of “North Side Gal,” featuring Bales and Block on vocals with Krauss and Stuart Duncan on fiddles, fill the air with the sounds of a raucous barn dance. The album closes with the exquisite “There’s a Light Up Ahead,” an aching and tender ode to hope, with Krauss’ ethereal vocals rising high into the sonic stratosphere.

Arcadia shimmers with an incandescent beauty, and every song on Alison Krauss & Union Station’s new album is a little slice of perfection.