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Pity the aging rock star. All those declarations about sugar mountains and hoping to die before he got old don't leave much room for middle age. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant understood this in 1997 as they began work on Walking Into Clarksdale, the duo's first album-length collaboration on all-new material since Led Zeppelin blew apart in 1980. Despite inevitable comparisons with the music of their youth, their work here (recorded by punk deity Steve Albini) is no embarrassment. Too many of the tracks are frustratingly dry and somber, but the duo find shades of "Kashmir" on the epic "Most High," while Plant croons a beautifully Zeppelinesque chorus on "When the World Was Young." Dancing days are here again. --Steve Appleford

Review

But the question we are going to ask of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant regarding Walking into Clarksdale--their first all-new work together since Led Zeppelin broke up--is not what they have learned, but the more common and less compelling rock query: What have they lost? Well, they certainly haven't lost their insight into women because they never had any to begin with.... For an album so crammed with supposed love songs, Walking into Clarksdale is just an essay in autoeroticism.... What the duo has really lost is grandeur of sound. Even though the Page and Plant-produced album is "recorded and engineered by Steve Abini," you get the feeling the uber-alt-rock producer only took the job because it sounded funny. Except for an awkward, grunge surge in the middle of "When the World Was Young," you can't really hear any Albini influence.... Clarksdale's "new" songs bear a faint family resemblance to all those five-minute power ballads of yore. And "Sons of Freedom" proves Page still has a few lickety-licks up his sleeve. But time has not been kind to Plant's throat and he can't muster a fraction of his former intensity. -- Spin

Of course, the ghost of Led Zeppelin still lingers. Walking into Clarksdale resounds with rich echoes from the band's aesthetically ambitious midperiod--primarily Houses of the Holy (1973) and Physical Graffiti (1975).... [Producer] Steve Albini lends raw, contemporary force to this meticulous recreation of Led Zeppelin's classic sound. -- Rolling Stone, ISBN13: B0000062S0 ISBN10: B0000062S0 Material Type: audioCD